We’ve all been there: you walk into class with an utterly splendid lesson plan. What discussion activities you have planned! What exciting, insightful, yet accessible questions you have prepped! What engrossing and provocative issues you have to discuss! You can hardly wait to begin. Let’s go! And then it all just fizzles out. Your activities … Continue reading »
Tag Archives: DeptTF
Book Review: Teaching in the Art Museum
Rika Burnham, Elliot Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience. J. Paul Getty Museum; 1st Edition edition (April 19, 2011) Reviewed by Anita Nikkanen, former Departmental Teaching Fellow of Classics and Comparative Literature Teaching in the Art Museum is, as the name makes plain, a book about teaching and learning with and about the art objects … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Summer Reading
Over the past two semesters, I have become quite accustomed to reading Odile’s Around the Web blog posts every Friday with suggested readings for the week. Unfortunately, the end of Odile’s position as a Departmental Teaching Fellow also brings the end of her time as an editor of the Bok Blog (which makes me incredibly sad!). … Continue reading »
Teaching with Objects, Part 1
In this four-part series, Departmental Teaching Fellows Anita Nikkanen (Comparative Literature), Erin Blevins (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology), and Meredith Schweig (Music) reflect on the why, how, and what of teaching with objects. These reflections grew out of “Teaching with Tangible Things: Museum Collections in the Classroom,” a workshop they offered at the Bok Center’s 2012 … Continue reading »
Book Review: The Practice of University History Teaching
Alan Booth, Paul Hyland (eds.), The Practice of University History Teaching. Manchester University Press: Manchester 2000. Reviewed by Martin Kroher, Departmental Teaching Fellow in East Asian Languages and Civilizations At first glance the usefulness of the edited volume The Practice of University History Teaching might appear to be limited to teachers in degree programs in history … Continue reading »
Saving Time for Students and Teachers
Victor Shnayder, a loyal Bok Blog reader (and former Departmental Teaching Fellow in SEAS) recently told me about several time-saving, online tools for teachers and students that I thought I’d share here. They are: 1) http://papergrader.org - Makes digital grading simpler. Students upload their papers to this site. Teachers add marginal and/or end comments and/or in-line edits. … Continue reading »
Understanding By Design
Understanding By Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe Reviewed by Jason Dowd, Departmental Teaching Fellow in Physics The idea is simple enough. In teaching, you first identify the desired results. Once that’s done, you figure out what students could do that would be evidence of such results. Finally, you plan activities and learning experiences geared … Continue reading »
A Reader Writes . . .
Nathan Stein, a graduate student and this year’s Departmental Teaching Fellow in the Statistics Department, wrote in to share an insight he had while listening to Steven Pinker’s talk at the recent HILT Symposium: [Pinker] said that the challenge of writing was converting a network of ideas into a linear string of words. He also … Continue reading »
The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal
The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal, by Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc Reviewed by Allison Gale, Departmental Teaching Fellow for Earth and Planetary Sciences Given its saccharine title, a skeptic might expect this book to be filled with touchy-feely jargon and ideas that lack substance. Instead, it strikes a welcome balance … Continue reading »
Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan
Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan Reviewed by Nathan Stein, Departmental Teaching Fellow for Statistics Teaching Statistics is an excellent resource to help instructors create more interactive introductory statistics classrooms. The book is organized in three parts, with the first devoted to activities for an intro course, covering descriptive … Continue reading »
