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| The Department Graduate Students Spacecraft Missions |
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Harold Larson, on the development of the Teaching Teams program At that time the University was being more insistent that we get more involved in undergraduate education. This is when the student-centered research university was slowly becoming the mantra. It meant basically that this Department had to do more teaching. Gene Levy hauled me into his office and said, “You’re going to teach.” So I was literally thrown into a classroom with no help. We taught just one section of an undergraduate course, so that semester I was the one teaching it. There were 90 kids in the class. That was big back then. It was in a building that was subsequently torn down, mercifully. It had virtually no AV capability, it had an overhead projector and the plug kept falling out of the wall because the outlet was so worn. It was a horrible teaching environment. They put so many kids in the classroom I had hardly any room at the front to walk back and forth without tripping over feet. I got through it. But I vowed at the end of the semester that I was never going to teach a class that way again, just lecturing with virtually no way to enhance the learning environment. So the first thing I did was choose carefully the next room I taught in. We didn’t have our building, so there were other classrooms on campus that would have more amenities. But the other thing that I wanted to do was get the kids involved to help me do things, like being assistants for some hands-on project, just to make the classroom environment more interesting. |
That eventually led to the Teaching Teams program, which formalized this arrangement, because it turned out that other faculty on campus were doing the same things. None of us knew the others existed. In ’96 or ’97, the Learning Center who knew about these little pockets of learner-centered education called us up, arranged a meeting with us and we all started comparing notes and said, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we got together and came up with a University-wide program? Let’s write a grant to the government.” So we did and got the grant the first time through, and that’s how the Teaching Teams program formally started. There was a lot of excitement back then about the new gen-ed program, a student-centered research university, not just lecturing but getting students involved, trying to bring innovation into the classroom. So we rode on that wave. The program has grown, and has achieved significant successes in how it’s been able to transform classrooms both by using students who are willing to volunteer and faculty who are willing to change their teaching styles. We’ve now been doing this for almost ten years, we’ve had multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Education, Hewlett Foundation, Kellogg Foundation—we’ve never been turned down for a grant, which is really exceptional in this very competitive field, because we’re always talking about doing something that addresses national programs, and we’re doing it in a classroom. We’re doing it in classrooms that no one else dares touch, the high-enrollment gen-ed classrooms. |
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