POLI1041 Fundamental Concepts of Politics I - Fall 2015
Teaching this course was a great opportunity for my growth as a teacher. It was my first experience writing a syllabus from scratch and I learned much about how to manage the workload of a course, how to adapt to a lecture course rather than a seminar, and how to properly incentivize student engagement. I also gained valuable experience teaching subjects outside of my subfield.
POLI2665 The Question of Justice - Spring 2013 and Spring 2015
I taught this course under the supervision of Professor Kelly and used the syllabus he provided, to which I made modifications to suit my own strengths as a teacher. For example, in this syllabus for the Spring 2013 semester (my changes are highlighted in yellow) I found that the original reader response assignment was not helping me grasp the students' concerns about the reading assignment, so I experimented with adding an option for the students to do in-class presentations.
Student presentations were on the whole successful, but were of uneven quality. The most successful portion of the assignment was the requirement to include discussion questions, so I decided for the Spring 2015 semester (my changes are again highlighted in yellow) to make providing questions stand in for both responses and presentations.
Click here for a list of the essay assignments for the Spring 2013 semester.
PO022 How to Take Over the World - Fall 2012
As a discussion section leader, I experimented with ways to stimulate the most productive discussion among a large group. What worked best in the end was to divide the twenty students into smaller groups of three or four, distribute prepared questions, and allow the group to formulate answers which we could then discuss as a whole class. Click here for a small sample of the questions I posed over the semester.
Teaching this course was a great opportunity for my growth as a teacher. It was my first experience writing a syllabus from scratch and I learned much about how to manage the workload of a course, how to adapt to a lecture course rather than a seminar, and how to properly incentivize student engagement. I also gained valuable experience teaching subjects outside of my subfield.
POLI2665 The Question of Justice - Spring 2013 and Spring 2015
I taught this course under the supervision of Professor Kelly and used the syllabus he provided, to which I made modifications to suit my own strengths as a teacher. For example, in this syllabus for the Spring 2013 semester (my changes are highlighted in yellow) I found that the original reader response assignment was not helping me grasp the students' concerns about the reading assignment, so I experimented with adding an option for the students to do in-class presentations.
Student presentations were on the whole successful, but were of uneven quality. The most successful portion of the assignment was the requirement to include discussion questions, so I decided for the Spring 2015 semester (my changes are again highlighted in yellow) to make providing questions stand in for both responses and presentations.
Click here for a list of the essay assignments for the Spring 2013 semester.
PO022 How to Take Over the World - Fall 2012
As a discussion section leader, I experimented with ways to stimulate the most productive discussion among a large group. What worked best in the end was to divide the twenty students into smaller groups of three or four, distribute prepared questions, and allow the group to formulate answers which we could then discuss as a whole class. Click here for a small sample of the questions I posed over the semester.