Setting goals for precalculus at GT
June 18th, 2009During Spring 2009, I took a course on teaching, learning, and the fundamentals of designing college courses offered through the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and taught by Assistant Director for Teaching Assistant Programs and Graduate Student Development Lydia Soleil. We read L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses and Maryellen Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice along with lots of chapters from other books and various articles. I have to say that this course was pretty transformational for me. Unlike your typical “teaching in higher education for PhD students” course that is taught by someone from an education or humanities department and populated by English, communications, and history graduate students because the future STEM faculty have heard awful things about the course’s domination by the humanities, this was a course by and for STEM disciplines. Lydia’s PhD is in physiology. The class members were mathematicians (5), chemists (3), electrical engineers (2), mechanical engineers (2), a biologist, and a civil engineer. All of us were sensitive to the issues of large service courses in the STEM disciplines and the issues peculiar to what we teach. We took the readings and examined them through a STEM lens and managed to come up with good ways to implement lots of things in our future courses. Read more »