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Sharon Prado, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, and Alan Marscher, a CAS astronomy professor and the center's new academic director, this year will create and online, University-wide teacher evaluation system and offer new resources to graduate teaching fellows. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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By David J. Craig
Standing before 400 students in the Core Curriculum natural science
course he teaches, Alan Marscher has some captivating, if unusual, tricks
up his sleeve. Among them is a Schecter electric guitar, which he occasionally
plugs in to blast a rock tune.
“
I use a lot of demonstrations to try to show students how exotic the
universe is,” says Marscher, a CAS astronomy professor, who received
CAS’s 1998 Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching. “One
day, I figured I’d play a song by Queen that involves relativity.
I got a good response, so I kept doing it. I have a half dozen of my
own songs that I use, too.”
As the new academic director of BU’s
Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET), Marscher, a former CAS associate
dean, now is sharing his enthusiam
for, and knowledge of, the classroom with faculty. A member of CET’s
advisory board since its founding in 2000, he was named academic director
in June. He succeeds Kevin Smith, a CAS physics professor, in the two-year
half-time position. As academic director, Marscher is CET’s primary
liaison to faculty, and together with executive director Sharon Prado,
he will work on professional development programs, lead faculty workshops
and panel discussions, and offer faculty teaching consultations.
New CET
initiatives Marscher will be overseeing this year include implementing
a University-wide online course evaluation system that will allow students
to rate the performance of their instructors using a standardized electronic
questionnaire, and the creation of new teaching resources aimed at graduate
teaching fellows.
Marscher says that departments in BU colleges and schools
currently administer their own course evaluations, which often are considered
in tenure and
promotion decisions. The student group Coursenet makes available student-designed
evaluations, which those choosing courses can consult. Working with the
Faculty Council and Coursenet, Marscher is coordinating the design of
a new evaluation form that he hopes will be used in all BU courses, thereby
streamlining the process and making results easier to interpret.
“
Our goal is to create an online evaluation form that will be universally
adopted throughout the University and will ask questions that are useful
to students as well as to the faculty and to the administration,” says
Marscher. “The students like collaborating with us because they
feel that by creating one high-quality form, their opinions gain credibility
with the faculty and the administration. And faculty members are anxious
to have one form because it is useful in building their teaching portfolio
to have solid documentation on how they do in the classroom.”
A
trial version of the new evaluation system, which also is called Coursenet,
should be in place by spring, says Marscher, who also is working with
University Information Systems to move the entire evaluation process
online.
This year, CET appointed Katie Kearns, a CAS biology instructor,
to provide professional development workshops for teaching fellows in
the natural
sciences and to develop a teaching fellow handbook.
“
The handbook will cover the nuts and bolts about teaching at BU,” says
Prado. “Teaching fellows here are treated differently than at other
institutions in that the University emphasizes their role as apprentice
teachers and as students of the teaching process, rather than simply
as employees. So it is a new and important aspect of our center to offer
teaching resources specifically to fellows.”
In addition, CET has
roughly a dozen new teaching workshops this year, on subjects such as
teaching with technology, using the library’s
electronic resources, and creating a teaching portfolio, as well as continuing
previous workshops on plagiarism and teaching large classes.
Also available
again this year is the center’s Peer Advising and
Mentoring Program, through which faculty can request to have an experienced
teacher observe and give advice on their teaching.
As with all CET’s
offerings, Marscher says, the mentoring program, which is entirely confidential,
is designed to be a nonthreatening way
to receive pointers. “I find that there are a lot of the younger
faculty members who are eager to get some feedback on their teaching,” says
Marscher. “They want to get the feedback from somebody who won’t
eventually be judging them for tenure or promotion, and that’s
one reason why it is valuable to have a central teaching center.
“
This center is here for senior faculty, too: teaching techniques and
technology keep changing, and not many people have time to investigate
for themselves all the newest teaching tools,” he continues. “We
have people here who can show teachers what they need to know in a nutshell.”
BU faculty members who would like to offer input regarding CET’s
programs can call 358-2488, or visit www.bu.edu/cet/.
19
September 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations