Calling the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award "the Nobel Prize of teaching at Berkeley," Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Professor Vincent Resh urged recipients to use the award to gain entry to the academic job market.
Resh addressed the 1997 OGSI award winners last spring at an Alumni House reception complete with Caribbean food, drink, and jazz. The annual awards are sponsored by the Graduate Student Instructor Teaching and Resource Center; the winners, comprising 10 percent, or about 200, of all GSIs, are chosen by their departments.
"When you're applying for jobs, make the most of this," Resh told his audience of award-winning GSIs. "Point out that you're really special, that you're a proven teacher. This is something that gives you that little edge into this very, very competitive job market. You really are the best of the best."
If the OGSI Award is the Nobel Prize of teaching at Berkeley, then the even more selective Teaching Effectiveness Award (TEA) must be the Nobel Peace Prize. The competition is open to the previous year's OGSI award winners, who nominate themselves by writing a one-page essay describing a teaching innovation or solution to a classroom problem. For last spring's prize, 100 OGSIs submitted essays; of these, 15 received awards, which included a $500 cash prize.
When Diana Selig won a TEA in 1996, she felt both honored and relieved. "Oh, this award proves that I know how to teach," she remembers thinking. "I don't have to worry about that anymore."
Famous last words, as any teacher--particularly any teacher worth an award--learns.
Selig was honored again when she was asked to be the featured speaker at the 1997 TEA ceremony last spring at the elegant Women's Faculty Club.
A Moment of Doubt
In her address, the award-winning history GSI confessed that the invitation to speak arrived when she was feeling her least confident as a teacher.
A student had recently approached her about "how we could make the class better," Selig said, to sympathetic laughter from her fellow award-winning GSIs. "My initial reaction was that, if the class was so bad that a student had to come talk to me, I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I wasn't such a good teacher after all."
Selig had taught the class before, and she assumed it would be easier the second time around. Hoping to devote more time to her research, she'd relied on her original lesson plans, into which, after all, she'd already invested a painstaking amount of work.
The flaw in this plan became apparent to her while researching John Dewey's theories of school reform--the very research, ironically, that she had put before her teaching.
According to Dewey, the teacher is a learner and the learner is a teacher.
"When we make an effort to learn along with and from our students," Selig said, "when we remind ourselves of the pleasures of gaining knowledge, when we approach even familiar material with renewed enthusiasm, we increase our effectiveness as teachers and learners."
Selig tore up her previous lesson plans and looked instead for a fresh approach. By the end of the semester, her teaching had garnered appreciative evaluations, including one from the student who'd complained.
"So rather than thinking of this conversation as a sign of my failure as a teacher," Selig said, to more appreciative laughter, "I decided to reframe this as a moment of success."
Moments of Success
How do teachers integrate these two roles, as teacher and as learner?
"One way," Selig said, "is to be open to our students' comments, to reshape our classes as needed."
A willingness to reshape their classes, to do something fresh, original, and innovative, is the common denominator that runs through the 1997 TEA winners.
In her elementary Hebrew class, Near Eastern Studies GSI Rachel Jacoby relied on a series of dialogues to convey the nuances of the language. One day, the text presented a particular challenge: a dialogue called "How to Get Along With a Jewish Mother." Yes, it was humorous, and the character was well known in Jewish folk culture, yet Jacoby found herself uncomfortable perpetuating such a stereotype. This led her to wondering what other stereotypes her students had developed based on media, their own experiences, and even her teaching.
She asked her students to come up with a list of phrases associated with Israelis. Then she drew a picture of a "typical" Berkeley student--tie-dyed shirt, Peet's coffee, peace sign--and encouraged students to illustrate the descriptions of Israelis they'd prepared. She and the class critiqued the drawings, recognizing and challenging the assumptions portrayed.
The Squish Box
When Geology GSI and 1997 TEA recipient Janine Weber-Band tried to explain folds and faults to her lab students using only paper maps or cross sections, she could tell they were not "getting it." After all, she was asking them to visualize three- and even four-dimensional concepts--the formation of geologic structures in time--using two-dimensional materials. So she looked around for something else. And there just happened to be, in her basement, an old sausage-making machine.
Aided by a grant and her department's shop technician, Weber-Band built what she and her students fondly call "The Squish Box." With the turn of a hand crank, students can observe through the box's Plexiglas walls different colored sands being pushed or pulled into faults and folds. If the flashes of insight on students' faces and their higher lab scores are any judge, the old adage about not watching sausage (or politics) being made clearly doesn't apply to geology.
These "moments of success" demonstrate a willingness to tear up lesson plans and reshape a class in response to what students are saying--or in some cases, not saying. And each reveals what Selig stressed in her TEA address: the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning.
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