Friday Profile

Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Michael Haithcock is well-known beyond U-M as a great conductor. He has garnered widespread acclaim for directing the world-class University of Michigan bands, he has commissioned and recorded numerous new musical works, and he is much in demand as a guest conductor.  Given this high profile, it might be easy to lose track of the fact that he's also an outstanding teacher of student musicians right here at the University of Michigan. As a teacher of conducting and director of student ensembles at U-M since 2001, Haithcock has gained a reputation as a professor who devotes extraordinary amounts of time to his individual students. He meets one-on-one with every member of the Symphony Band each semester, attends the senior recital of every band student, and writes scores of recommendation letters annually. Read more »

As teachers at an institution committed to "global engagement," how can U-M instructors best facilitate students' international experiences and connections? And how can we enable students to make meaningful differences in the world? Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Kathleen Sienko has been a campus leader on these questions, developing programs that take students around the world as well as programs that enable students here in Ann Arbor to make and mobilize global connections utilizing the resources of the internet.

Design for Global Health.  Sienko was honored with the 2012 Teaching Innovation Prize for this capstone program she developed for undergraduate engineering students. Under Sienko's guidance, in collaboration with Dr. Aileen Huang-Saag and building on several long-standing U-M connections in Africa, students in the program have worked with clinicians in resource-limited settings--initially in Ghana, then in other African countries and China--to design medical devices to address needs in specific areas of global health (e.g., maternal health, infant mortality, or HIV/AIDS). Student designs have included an assisted obstetric delivery device, a multi-functional labor and delivery bed, and an adult male circumcision tool. Through a combination of field work, course work, cross-cultural training, and hands-on design experience, students in the program learn to define problems, adjust their solutions to accommodate real-world limitations, and collaborate in culturally-sensitive ways.  

Statements by student participants reflect the program's emphasis on using action-based learning Read more »

What concepts are students still struggling with after lecture?  How can I most effectively supplement lectures to enhance student learning?  Will my efforts to provide additional resources actually pay off in terms of student success?

These key questions -- familiar to many instructors in large lecture courses -- structured Joanna Mirecki Millunchick’s teaching innovation in MSE (Materials and Science Engineering) 220.  Because the course draws engineering majors with widely varying degrees of experience with course concepts, Professor Millunchick was especially interested in offering diverse students opportunities to review lecture topics and learn at a pace appropriate to their needs. 

Her central innovation? Screencasts.  Millunchick developed a range of screencasts (i.e., online videos of her computer screen, accompanied by audio) on topics students were struggling with.  The screencasts included lecture recordings, explanations of homework, and exam solutions.  In just one example of her creative use of technology, Millunchick used a tablet PC and stylus to record her process of drawing diagrams, producing videos that students could watch and review on their own schedule.  CTools allowed her to keep track of which students used the screencasts and how often.  And then she assessed the relation of these data to student success in the course.  

She found, quite simply, that students who used her screencasts earned higher grades in the course, but the greatest gains were for those students who started with less familiarity with the topic.   Read more »