Economics professor Jose Vazquez enjoys the occasional game of basketball. Luckily for him, he knows he can go to the ARC every day at noon, without fail, to find a court full of challengers ready to hit the hardwood.
“I wanted to have something similar for teaching,” Vazquez said.
With the environment and accessibility of an open gym in mind, Vazquez has revamped the LAS Teaching Academy since taking over two years ago. In the same fashion that basketball players head to the courts to polish and showcase their skills, the academy allows LAS faculty to learn and share classroom innovations across a range of disciplines—they just won’t be able to work on their jump shots.
Vazquez became director of the LAS Teaching Academy in 2014. The program launched in 1999 under political science professor Paul Diehl, now associate provost at the University of Texas-Dallas. Diehl, who ran the academy until 2009, said the program began as an opening faculty workshop and junior faculty mentoring program that grew to include more elements over time.
Since taking the reins two years ago, Vazquez has made the academy’s primary activity a monthly open forum for any and all faculty looking to pick up some new tips for teaching their respective courses. Beginning in February, Vazquez made the workshops available to teaching assistants as well.
“Getting together across fields is a great way to gain exposure, especially as TAs, to many approaches to teaching,” said Tom Sahajdack, a teaching assistant in economics. “It gives me concrete examples of how various ideas for teaching actually went in another professor’s classroom. I’d rather know the right way to implement something, or at least some of the best practices, than mess it up trying to figure it out on my own.”
Workshops are held on either the first or second Friday of each month in David Kinley Hall. The meetings usually draw dozens of participants and include free lunch along with a lecture given by one or more faculty members. Workshops have addressed broad teaching topics such as general approaches to online teaching and engaging small classrooms, as well as course-specific topics in fields like sociology or mathematics.
February’s lecture addressed the effectiveness of online peer assessment in large enrollment courses. Vazquez led the discussion and said he had heard of the peer grading method from a peer in the Department of English. He wanted to share it with professors across a wide range of disciplines who would have otherwise never heard of the concept.
“I learned something from someone in another discipline that applies to my class, and I would’ve never been exposed to it if I just continued to rely on people in my own discipline,” Vazquez said. “You learn a lot from seeing what other people are doing in disciplines that are not yours.”
It’s that type of interdisciplinary learning that Vazquez hopes to continue to achieve through the monthly workshops.
“I’m beginning to see a lot of people who kind of leave their Fridays at lunch open so they can come to the academy,” Vazquez said. “I don’t know where that eventually is going to go, but the idea is that it brings a change in the culture so that people who care about teaching can actually interact a lot more.”
