McCardell Bicentennial Hall 216
276 Bicentennial Way
Middlebury, VT 05753
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Open to the Public

Image of a woman wearing a yellow blouse and blue jacket

Title: My journey from “Great lecturer, hard tests, impossible class” to “She actually seems like she cares about her students and their success in her class”

Talk Description: When I transitioned from biology research to a teaching position, I approached my new position with enthusiasm, good intentions, and strong commitment, but little practical background or knowledge about how to do the job I was hired to do. However, working over many years with generous, creative, and patient students and colleagues, I came to focus on engaging with students and building structures for them to engage with the content and each other—moving toward a community- and student-centered practice. In this session I’ll summarize some of my experiences and will draw on the experiences of participants to collaboratively explore resources and evidence to help meet the challenge of teaching our actual students rather than idealized images of our students.

Bio:

Lisa Elfring currently serves as Associate Vice Provost of Instruction and Assessment at the University of Arizona, co-leading the University Center for Assessment, Teaching, and Technology (UCATT). She is a continuing Specialist in Biology Education in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Her training and teaching interests lie in molecular genetics and cell/developmental biology, and her scholarship focuses on developing supports for instructors as they use active-learning strategies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms and developing holistic frameworks and tools for evaluation of teaching. In 25 years at the University of Arizona, Lisa has taught a wide variety of courses for nearly 10,000 biology majors, graduate students, teachers-in-training, working teachers, and medical students. Her teaching and advising have been recognized by awards from the University of Arizona College of Science and the University of Arizona W. A. Franke Honors College; she is an Associate Professor in the BIO5 Institute, a Fellow for PULSE, the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education, and a research-section editor for the Journal of Microbiology Education (JMBE).

Please contact the biology coordinator for the zoom link: mathomps@middlebury.edu

Sponsored by:
Biology

Contact Organizer

Thompson, Missey
mathomps@middlebury.edu
443-5258