The End of the Semester

Hello, fellow teaching fellows! My name is Stacey and I am a 4th year PhD candidate in clinical psychology. For our final blog entry of the academic semester (happy Last Day of Classes, by the way!), I would like to take this moment to remind myself – and possibly you – of how to take advantage of this special time of the year as a professor-in-the-making. The exams have been written. The final papers have been assigned. Our students are frantically cramming out enjoying this blissful and carefree spring afternoon. What is a bored teaching fellow to do before the deluge of grading begins? Before you rush off to the lab or run to go complete your dissertation progress report (am I the only one still getting reminders for that?), I want to let you know that this is actually a perfect time to work on polishing your teaching dossier.

Reflecting Back for Projecting Forward

We all know that the end of the semester is the time to assess our students’ learning and acquired abilities. With any luck, you may have approached your semester from the perspective of Backward Design and built your course around carefully selected learning goals. But what about assessing your own growth and learning as an instructor? How can we evaluate ourselves and our own teaching progress?

Perhaps you have already administered your own end-of-the-semester evaluations. If you have, great! If you haven’t, it’s not too late! The free website www.surveymonkey.com is easy to use and emailing a link isn’t so hard either. These evaluations can be helpful as a summary of student reactions to the course – and to you as an instructor. Ask students to rate, rank, or somehow assess a few of the approaches you’ve used to enhance their learning. What students like isn’t as important as what's helping them learn. Sometimes they forget that. Sometimes we do too. For sample evaluation forms, see Appendix D of our Becoming Teachers handbook.

Type out a summary of your students’ comments and be careful to avoid focusing on the extremes. While one student might suggest that your sections are akin to pedagogical waterboarding, another student might want to continue attending your office hours over the summer to bask in the glow of your genius. Don’t let the hyperboles drown out the more balanced and reasonable comments. If you write up a summary, every voice will be heard and you’ll see that the polarized evaluations are far less important than the many moderate ones. Bonus hint! Make copies of all of your evaluations and keep them on file. Evaluations are often an important part of your teaching portfolio.

In addition to your students’ perspective on how the course went, take a moment to reflect on your own thoughts and feelings about the semester. Did you experiment with anything new? How did it go? Looking back, what would you do differently? What techniques did you use that were effective for student learning? Jot down your thoughts and experiences in one place... a “teaching journal” of sorts. This gives you a single place to generate ideas, troubleshoot problems, and reflect on your own successes and struggles as a budding teacher – an invaluable resource when planning future courses and creating a teaching portfolio. You might even be able to use an anecdote or two in your Teaching Statement. The experiences you reflect on now just might be the stories you will tell when you are interviewing for a job. In case you’re not convinced, or for more tips, tricks, and recommendations on keeping a teaching journal, see this gradhackerblog post.

Basking in the NOW

While you wrap your mind around the mental exercise that is looking backward and forward at the same time, give your neck a break and focus your attention and awareness on the here and now. Experience the sensations that come with the end of another semester – without regret for the past or worry for the future. Congratulate yourself for surviving another year and remember that making it to this point is a success unto itself!

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 2013!

Spicing up your teaching

Hello teaching world! My name is Jen and I’m a 5^th year PhD candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and also a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center. I recently co-led The Adventurous TF: Teaching with Food and would like to share the idea more widely! With this post, I'll provide some reasons why teaching with food might be a good idea and share some examples from a range of disciplines.

 

Why teach with food?

There are many reasons why college-level educators might use food in the classroom. The reference list at the end of this post provides more information about the pedagogy of teaching with food. For our purposes, I'll share three key motivations:

Learning styles

Students retain course material better when content speaks to multiple learning modalities.  Here at the YTC, we often talk about different learning styles using the acronym VARK, which signifies learning preferences (i.e. visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic). Teaching with food brings the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses to the classroom. In short, creating a multi-sensorial approach to learning is more than just a fun classroom exercise – it deepens students’ engagement with the course material. 

Personal connection

Connecting students’ personal experiences with course content is another way to peak their interest. Everyone eats, so all of your students have some level of personal connection to food. These experiences are a great starting point for exploring a variety of complex topics: labor, globalization, nostalgia, ethnic identity, gender, family, etc. In my sections of WGSS 120: Women, Food, and Culture, I ask each student to sign up for “food sharing,” where they are asked to give a 1-2 minute presentation. Students might present on a food that is important in their hometowns (e.g. lobster in a coastal Maine town), bring in a recipe that is important to them (on paper or as a dish to share with the class), or conduct a guided tasting (e.g. a particular ethnic food or childhood favorite).

Building community

Sharing food in the classroom can be a great way to build community and lower social barriers. Some teachers, including Risa Sodi (see below), notice that when their students are engaged in the act of food preparation, their defenses are lowered and conversation flourishes. 

How to use food in the classroom?

There are three primary ways to engage with food in the classroom: as a lens to explore diverse social and cultural issues, as a topic worthy of study in its own right, and as the physical material for academic inquiry and learning (Deutsch and Miller 2012).  I'll provide an example for each.

Food as lens 

  

Risa Sodi, a senior lecturer in the Italian Language and Literature department (and the Interim Associate Director here at the Yale Teaching Center) uses food as a lens for exploring Italian culture. She projects a list of flavors: 

Chocolate
Chocolate chip
Cookies and cream
Hazelnut
Lemon
Mint chocolate chip
Neopolitan
Pistachio
Rocky Road
Strawberry
Vanilla
Vanilla cream 
 

Risa then asks her students to identify the nine most popular American ice cream flavors and the seven most popular Italian gelato flavors. At the end of the exercise, Risa asks students to share which flavors they chose and to reflect on what sort of cultural assumptions their answers reflect. (You’ll have to stop by the YTC office to get the answers…) As part of their inquiry into Italian culture, Risa’s students actually get to prepare and eat authentic Italian dishes. To delve further, she asks her students to consider key food symbols of the Italian 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (e.g. menu ingredient, cocktail, kitchen object). 

Food as subject

During a section of WGSS 120 Women, Food, and Culture on food safety, we discussed the politics of pasteurization.  Retail sale of raw milk is legal in Connecticut, so I brought in milks ranging from the ultra-high pasteurized industrially aggregated milk to the hyper-local raw milk. I had three learning goals for my students: (1) to dissect packages for information related to food production, (2) to analyze imagery related to human-nature relationships, (2) to taste differences in a food product that is often thought to be a uniform commodity.

Food as material 

At the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, food becomes the material for scientific inquiry – one of the most talked about Harvard College courses Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter a public lecture series that you can access via iTunes or YouTube. Similarly, a whole world of chemistry lessons come to life through chocolate.  

For example, if you're teaching chemistry or materials science, you might have your students read an article about the materials science of chocolate -- the tempering process is a great way to talk about the relationship between time, temperature, and the resulting crystal structure. If the course had a lab component, you might have students try 3-4 different tempering rates. They could analyze the resulting crystal structure through materials characterization techniques, but just as importantly, you could instruct them to taste the results!

I hope these examples have provoked your own thoughts about how you might teach with food. Please share your ideas by commenting on this blog post!

Additional resources

Bender, D., R. Ankeny, et al. (2011). "Eating in Class: Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History." Radical History Review 2011(110): 197-216.

Bonnekessen, B. (2010). "Food is Good to Teach: An Exploration of the Cultural Meanings of Food." Food, Culture & Society 13(2): 279-295.

Desjardins, M. (2004). "Teaching about Religion with Food." Teaching Theology & Religion 7(3): 153-158.

Deutsch, J. and J. Miller (2012). Teaching with Food. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. J. M. Pilcher, Oxford University Press: 191-205.

Guthman, J. (2007). "Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al." Agriculture and Human Values 24(2): 254-261.

Johnson, D. M. (2007). "Teaching Anthropology Through Food." Southern Foodways and Culture: Local Considerations and Beyond.

Long, L. M. (2001). "Nourishing the Academic Imagination: The Use of Food in Teaching the Concept of Culture." Food and Foodways 9(3-4): 235-262.

It’s never too early to start planning an effective review session!

As the end of the spring term is only a few weeks away, now is a great time to start preparing final exam review sessions!  After all, it is not only your students that have to revisit all of that content that has been covered in the past few months.  Though this task can seem daunting there are ways to streamline your prep for review sessions.  In this blog post, you will find some tips for preparing and running review sessions that will be rewarding for both you and your students. 

Gather information about the exam

Know where, when and how long the final exam will be.  Be sure that you have an idea of the content that will be covered and the format of the exam.  Being familiar with the themes covered in the exam will provide a scaffold around which to structure your review session.  The idea is not to give students hints about specific exam questions but to frame a review session around material that the students will need to know.

Gather information about your students

Your students’ past performances on midterms or problem sets will reveal what topics will need to be covered in more depth during the review session.  Make sure to have an idea of the students’ schedule when you are choosing a time for the review session.  Be aware of when classes end, what the reading days are and the exam date.  You want to time the review session in a way that students will have already begun studying, but will still have time to address any areas of weakness they might become aware of in the review session.  If you wish to make an effort to get as many students to attend the review session as possible, I would recommend trying a user-friendly free online tool found at www.doodle.com that makes scheduling easier!

Make sure you master the material

Given your role in the course, you are expected to have a good grasp of the content.  This can cause you to feel quite a bit of pressure.  To alleviate some of this, put the burden back on your students and require that they e-mail you questions before the review session.  Though you should still be familiar with the course material that students do not specifically ask about, this exercise will help to orient you to the topics that may be the most discussed during the review session. 

Have a plan for the review session-and stick to it!

Make an outline for what you plan to cover in the review session.  Prepare some sample questions and answers that you can use during the review session or give to your students for use when they are studying.  Using sample answers provides a great chance to demonstrate what constitutes a good answer.  This will serve as an example of what you will be looking for when you are grading their exams.  Let your students know what to expect before coming to the review session so that they are able to prepare.  There are many options for the format of the review session.  Rather than using only a lecture format to cover the material, it can be fun to try some alternative styles.  A few examples are: a question and answer session, making a group outline on the board, playing a game of Jeopardy that covers all the themes on the exam, working through practice problems and giving an overview presentation on how the topics of the course relate to each other.  Feel free to try different things in the review session and find what works for you!

 

It is important to remember that exam time, though stressful for teachers, is also a major source of angst for your students.  Being nervous around exam time can be helpful for students and provide an extra source of adrenaline, but if students become too stressed this heightened state can become an impediment to their performance. To help with stress management encourage students to adequately prepare for the exam, recognize what they DO know about the content and take care of themselves by eating well and sleeping enough.  Be aware of resources offered through the counseling center for extreme cases of stress. 

Hopefully these tips on running review sessions have alleviated some of the anxiety you might feel about preparing a review session