In this episode we’re joined by Michael Honsberger, neuroscientist and STEM project manager for the Yale Young Global Scholars program. Michael has a background studying memory including a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and a postdoc in Yale’s Division of Molecular Psychiatry. He talks to us about how we can use knowledge of how the brain works to become better teachers.
I have a friend who is an amazing teacher. His students rave about his classes, and when I first started teaching statistical methods, he gave me terrific advice, nearly all of which I’ve followed. A few weeks ago I ran into him at a work dinner, and he said something that shocked me: He doesn’t read his course evaluations anymore.
People vary a lot in the quantity and quality of email they receive. Depending on the time of year, I get between fifty and a few hundred messages per day. Some of it requires a timely response and some is reference material that I want or need to read eventually. Some mail can be quickly read and addressed, while other messages require a fair bit of time and effort. I’ve battled my mail with a range of strategies over the years, but have recently found a combination that work pretty well. I share them here in hopes of helping others move toward email sanity.
This episode is extra-special as we’re joined not by any faculty, but instead by Maia Eliscovich-Sigal and Miguel Goncalves. Maia is a senior economics major here at Yale and Miguel is a senior global affairs major. They give us the students’ perspective on their classes and tell us what they find works and doesn’t work when professors lecture, organize discussions, and use technology.
I think clickers are a great way to get students actively engaged in a lecture class, and a pretty good way to learn whether students are learning what you’re teaching so you can do something about it immediately. This semester I wanted use them for a third purpose: Collect high quality data on who attended which lectures. It was a total failure.
On a recent episode of the Teach Better Podcast, Boris Kapustin told me that he hates the word fun. I actually understand where he’s coming from. What we teach is important and we both want our students to work hard and take it seriously. At the same time, I firmly believe fun can induce hard work and serious learning. That was the idea behind the end-of-semester poster session I organized last night for my econometrics class. It was full of fun, exchange of ideas, and absolutely it was the result of hard work on everyone’s part.
Lecture capture is a relatively new technology that allows fully automated recording of classes. It usually involves a camera at the back of the classroom, a microphone on the professor’s lapel, and equipment that records what happens on the screen. The combined audio and video is then made available to students soon after the end of each lecture. I’m a big fan and have been using it for all my classes for more than two years now. My students love it, but it’s very hard to assess its causal impact on either attendance or performance.
The Yale Center for Teaching and Learning is moving into a new home next year, and they are hard at work designing it. One of my favorite elements will be a set of several classrooms outfitted with the latest teaching technology that faculty can use to experiment. Just the other day Ed Kairiss asked for my thoughts on what should go into these new “learning spaces.” Here’s what I suggested:
Gerald Jaynes, Professor of Economics and African American Studies, has been teaching fearlessly at Yale for more than 30 years. He currently teaches popular courses in the Economics of Discrimination, Poverty under Postindustrial Capitalism, and Social Science of the Black Community, and is always experimenting with new ideas in the classroom.