If you're teaching this term, I encourage you to contact CRLT soon to schedule a Midterm Student Feedback session for your course. I want to emphasize that these consultations are:

• Wholly confidential, between yourself and the CRLT staff member only, with no communication to your department. They are meant only to inform your own teaching.  
• Formative, not summative. They offer you an opportunity to improve upon a course while it is still underway.
• Appreciated by students. Often, students experience the midterm evaluations as a sign that you are committed to hearing them and to thinking self-critically about your teaching (in the same way that we often ask our students to be self-critical about their experience with the material we are teaching them!).
• Conducted efficiently and effectively. Having a midterm feedback session does not require giving up a significant amount of classroom time.
• Consistently, year after year, the feature of LS&A Teaching Academy that receives the highest marks from new faculty for its usefulness in improving teaching.  

It's not always easy to let someone else into your classroom, but the rewards are substantial. I have been teaching since 1994, and I think I do a pretty good job. But I have never failed to learn from a midterm evaluation. Indeed, many of our most distinguished teachers have already scheduled their feedback sessions for this fall. I urge you to do the same.

Philip J. Deloria
LSA Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of History and American Culture 
 

You can find CRLT on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/crlteaching.  Because YouTube is one of the many Google Apps now in use on campus, all members of the U-M community can easily share videos with the public or with select users at U-M.  CRLT's channel is dedicated to using YouTube to support teaching excellence and innovation.  The videos currently featured include several Arthur F. Thurnau professors discussing their successful teaching strategies.  For example:

• Deborah Ball, Dean of the School of Education, on ways to incorporate active learning in large classes
• Scott Moore of the Ross School of Business on using technology and collaboration to engage students
• Alford Young, Professor of Sociology and Afroamerican and African Studies, on how to discuss challenging issues in the classroom and help students develop critical thinking skills.  

The channel also features teaching resources such as ...  Read more »

"You are asked to design an original experiment that would be suitable for a high school teacher to use in demonstrating any mass or heat transfer principle or concept to his/her class. The goal is to use your experiments to attract high school students to chemical engineering."  

So begins the group project assignment for Chemical Engineering 342 designed by Assistant Professor Omolola Eniola-Adefeso, winner of the 2012 Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP). Motivated to improve retention rates of diverse students in STEM fields and inspired by her own experiences with hands-on learning early in her undergraduate engineering career, Dr. Eniola-Adefeso developed an assignment that combined self-directed learning, collaboration, and outreach.   Read more »