Carla Horwitz spends her time teaching undergraduates about child development and directing one of the nation’s premiere early child care centers: the Calvin Hill Day Care Center and Kitty Lustman-Findling Kindergarten. In our conversation we talk about how these two jobs overlap, the importance of quality early education, and how college classrooms should be places for creativity and play.
In this episode, we reflect back to identify eight habits which almost all of our guests have used to teach effectively. If you’re new to the podcast, this is a great place to start since it’s filled with our favorite quotes from earlier episodes.
For every teacher out there doing cool things in the classroom and blogging about it, there must be another hundred doing great work and not shouting it from the rooftops. Julia Kregenow from the Penn State Astronomy and Astrophysics Department is one of those people. She thinks deeply about teaching and has taught a wide range of classes in astronomy, math, and physics including several geared toward freshmen. I love how she has reasons for every choice she makes, and explains these choices to her students. Today, Julia is letting me share excerpts from a recent syllabus where she does exactly this.
June is the time of year when most faculty are just settling into a summer away from teaching. Not me though–after submitting my spring grades I had about 2 weeks of catching up on everything I put off during the semester, and now I’m back at it teaching econometrics online in Yale Summer Session.
In this episode, Vida Maralani, Yale Assistant Professor of Sociology, joins us with two of her students, Dan Rubins and Avery Jones. Together, we talk about how Vida teaches classes on social issues and quantitative methods to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Women are hugely under-represented in economics. This is true in the “real world,” but it’s equally true in college. Nationwide, there about three male economics majors for every female, and it’s not much better at elite institutions like Yale where males outnumber females by more than two to one.
Larry Samuelson is an accomplished economic theorist, and at the same time is one of the best instructors in the Yale Economics Department. He teaches microeconomic theory to the first year PhD students as well as Intermediate Microeconomics, a required class in the major that forms the foundation of almost every advanced undergraduate class in economics. In this episode Larry tells us how he challenges and engages his students.
Since starting in February, we’ve recorded nine episodes of the Teach Better Podcast with some terrific guests. Every one of our guests has been Yale-affiliated, and I wanted to take a few minutes to explain why. The key thing to understand that it’s not because we think Yale has a monopoloy on great teaching–We don’t. There are passionate teachers and mediocre teachers and even just plain bad teachers everywhere. So if great things are happening in classrooms all over the world, why aren’t we casting a wider net?
In his research, Yale English Professor David Bromwich writes about modern and Romantic poetry as well as the history of literary criticism. He has also taught an astonishing variety of courses over the last twenty years. In this episode, he tells us how and why he’s done it.