Ideal teachers share best practices
Great teachers help shape lives. That’s why movies like Finding Forrester, Dead Poets Society and To Sir, With Love can resonate so deeply. Now, a new initiative launched in January by UVic’s Learning and Teaching Centre is helping inspire the next generation of university professors. Teaching excellence is a top priority at UVic, and at the end of January, past recipients of UVic teaching awards opened their classroom doors for two days to graduate students for a firsthand experience of excellent teaching in action.
Nearly 100 graduate students participated in the Sharing Best Practice event on Jan. 30 and 31. They attended 29 undergraduate classes ranging from introductory psychology and political ecology to minority language issues and advanced thermodynamics.
“Ironically, teaching is often a solitary activity for teachers themselves, one we don’t share enough with others. I want to thank these brave colleagues for so generously opening their classroom doors so that others can learn from them,” says Teresa Dawson, director of the Learning and Teaching Centre and a senior instructor in UVic’s Department of Geography.
The award-winning instructors who led the classes included Mary Sanseverino (computer science), Martin Smith (psychology), Judith Mitchell (English), Gregory Rose (Greek and Roman studies) and David Blades (curriculum and instruction), to name only a few.
Cynthia Korpan, TA Training Program Manager, who organized the event, says, “Observing someone else teach allows beginning teachers to watch real-life teaching situations. During this event, graduate students were exposed to different classroom management strategies, student interactions, and new approaches to teaching. The outcome is that graduate students will be better prepared for when they teach undergraduate students.”
On Jan. 31, PhD candidate Catherine Nutting (history in art), a recipient of UVic’s 2011 Andy Farquharson Award for graduate student teaching, sat in on Sanseverino’s first-year class on computers and information processing. Computer Science 105 gives students the chance to develop a range of technical problem-solving abilities and is composed of two topics related to computers and the computing environment: one addresses the “what” and the other the “how” of computing.
“I was able to observe how the professor introduced topics, organized her time on key concepts and kept students engaged,” says Nutting. “I noticed how comfortable she was in the classroom—how she used the classroom technology and didn’t waste time fiddling with the projector, etc. I noticed her use of clear graphics combined with her verbal explanations. She brought in objects to pass around that related to her topic; she used i-clicker questions; and she shared her own interest and excitement in topics.”
Master’s candidate Jeff Pufahl (theatre) attended a first-year psychology class taught by Smith who, as a UVic Teaching Professor, is recognized by the university as exceptional in teaching not just with a teaching award but also with this specific designation. “It was great to see Martin use so many different teaching techniques to engage the students and keep the content interesting. His mastery of the technology was remarkable and he was pretty funny as well,” says Pufahl.
An earlier Ring story on teaching assistants (TAs) at UVic is available at http://bit.ly/wlg6eu. Information about UVic’s teaching award winners can also be found at the Ring website, including last year’s winners: http://bit.ly/yXBGHP.
View a video filmed during the special two-day initiative.
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