Often when faculty express an interest in exploring and adopting new teaching, they ask: Where should I begin?  What should I do? How will it help? If an instructor will take even a small step, the next may be easier.  Education specialists advise us to create multiple, low-risk settings that encourage students to try new ideas and test new skills. It would seem that the same advice applies to developing one’s own teaching practice and in encouraging useful change among colleagues.

Many engineering systems are too complex to be studied with experimental or analytical methods. Thus, computational techniques are an essential element in the engineering profession. The current mechanical engineering curriculum introduces these tools during their sophomore year in ME 318 – Engineering Computational Methods, but there is limited opportunity for “spiral learning” to reinforce the concepts and techniques learned.

The primary purpose of the Health Communication Scholars Program was to improve training of graduate students interested in health communication to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration and secure grant funding for research projects. More structured education and experience with this process as graduate students would better prepare these students for expectations they will face as junior faculty–to work with colleagues in other fields, find creative ways to align research interests, and propose projects for competitive funding.

In order to better advise students, we need to have a fuller understanding of how individual students learn in various environments; what strategies tend to work best in online vs blended classrooms; and what types of students are going to profit most from the advantages—and be harmed least by the disadvantages—of each learning environment. The project will use the accompanying grant to fund a study that compares student learning strategies and success in the online and blended versions of Introduction to Ancient Rome (CC 302).

With the much-anticipated addition of a medical school on The University of Texas at Austin campus, we have an ideal opportunity to reexamine health-professional education, and plan for a more collaborative interprofessional education approach to address the future health-care needs of Texas, the United States and world health. The goal of an interprofessional education approach is to prepare health professional students to deliberately work together with the common goal of building a safer and better patient-centered and community/population oriented health care system.

Based on a long-standing interest in peer observation in my own college, the intent of this project was to foster a broad campus discussion on the importance of this collegial practice for improving teaching and learning and enhancing faculty development.

A primary tool in helping instructors improve their teaching skills is a careful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses they exhibit in the classroom environment. While end-of-semester student evaluations can offer valuable feedback on these matters, the numerical summaries and written commentaries those evaluations provide are often too unfocused to help teachers progress at their craft from one semester to the next.

Because there is only one other required course for English majors (the research seminar), E314 is taught with special attention to the skills and experiences UT English majors need for their later coursework. All E314 classes have the dual tasks of introducing students to our discipline and preparing them for success in upper-division courses. All E314 courses also emphasize the teaching both of critical methods and of critical writing and revision.