Monroe Weber-Shirk has taught engineering at Cornell for 24 years, and in 2005 he started the AguaClara Cornell program where he works closely with local partners, graduate students, and up to 80 undergraduates at a time. Together they develop, implement, and maintain sustainable water treatment facilities in multiple developing countries. It’s an incredible model of deeply engaged learning at scale, and in this episode Monroe tells us how it works and how he got here.
Mac Stetzer from the University of Maine Department of Physics and Astronomy is an active physics education researcher with lots of experience teaching teachers how to teach physics better. In this episode he shares his lessons learned working with undergraduate learning assistants, graduate student teaching assistants, and teachers at the K-12 level.
After singing the praises of two stage exams a few weeks ago, I was dismayed when I saw the scores on our latest (two stage) midterm exam. Average individual scores were low (67), and while average group scores were higher (77), there was clearly a whole bunch of learning being left on the table. Luckily my teaching team is a creative bunch, and we improvised a successful third stage for the exam.
Like so many things I’ve tried in the classroom this year, I first heard about two-stage exams at Carl Wieman’s summer workshop. The idea is to have students first take an exam individually (i.e., the usual way), and then have them take the same exam again in groups. My students in Applied Econometrics have done this three times this spring and the results have been glorious.
Everyone has an opinion about course evaluations, but unfortunately most of these opinions are based on personal anecdotes and armchair speculation. Our guest in this episode is Betsy Barre, author of several articles reviewing the literature on what’s right and what’s wrong with course evaluations. Betsy is currently an Associate Director at Rice University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, and in May 2018 she will move on to become the Executive Director of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative at Wake Forest University. We cover a lot of ground during our conversation about this important and complex topic.
I have tried many different combinations of hardware and software in my classroom, but believe it or not, my current set up seems to have staying power. It turns out I love walking around with my iPad and annotating my slides from anywhere in the room.
Andrea Stevenson Won is an assistant professor in the Cornell Communication Department where she directs the Virtual Embodiment Lab. She studies how people communicate in virtual environments and how this differs from other forms of communication. She spends her days working with the latest virtual reality gear and conducting experiments in virtual worlds. She’s also collaborating with physicists to create new ways of teaching using VR. In this episode Andrea talks with us about how virtual reality affects her teaching today and how it could affect all our teaching tomorrow.
Cornell psychologist Robert Sternberg has done seminal work on creativity, wisdom, and cognitive styles. He cares deeply about higher education and teaching, and in this episode we focus on the role of creativity in the classroom. We talk about the importance of creativity in today’s labor market, how to measure creativity, and how students are motivated to learn when they are given an opportunity to be creative.
Standard assessments of student learning are vital to quantifying the effectiveness of different teaching methods (Freeman et al. 2014). Physics, biology, and chemistry have well over 100 publicly available assessments that cover a wide range of courses and topics. Economics currently has only one high quality standard assessment that is appropriate for undergraduate students: the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE). George Orlov (Cornell’s first Economics Active Learning Initiative postdoc) and I have spent the last six months developing two new assessments of learning in econometric methods that we hope will catalyze improvements in economic education.