Creative and Impactful Teaching Honored at Annual Ceremony
University faculty members and graduate students were recognized for their classroom creativity, innovation and impact during the recent Celebration of Teaching Excellence ceremony hosted by the Center for Teaching Excellence.
The Creative Teaching Awards are presented to faculty who use creativity and innovation in their teaching methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of their methods on student learning.
The 2018 Creative Teaching awardees include:
- Dr. Bryan Menk, Palumbo-Donahue School of Business
Menk’s project Teaching Taxation Through Age-Based Scenarios allowed students to be introduced to taxation topics based on when these items would be relevant in an individual’s life, rather than in the order that the topics appear on the tax return. The innovation is designed to help the students become comfortable with tax forms through the preparation of multiple returns; develop a strong tax knowledge base; and recognize the significance of taxation in daily life.
- Dr. Wilson Meng and Dr. Lauren O’Donnell, School of Pharmacy
Meng and O’Donnell’s project A Data-Mining Practicum for Enhancing Pharmacy Students’ Understanding of the Impacts of Genes on Medications was created to help students decipher genetic and pharmacological complexities to deliver quality health care. A bioinformatics practicum was developed and implemented into the second year of the professional pharmacy curriculum and was designed to help students delineate interactions between genes and drugs.
- Dr. Waganesh Zeleke, School of Education
Zeleke’s project Using Self-Regulated Learning Strategies to Develop Students’ Multicultural Counseling Competencies introduces a pedagogical approach to teaching multicultural counseling knowledge and skills to graduate students. Self-regulated learning strategies were integrated throughout coursework to enhance students’ understanding of themselves as cultural beings and to develop their counseling skills to improve outcomes for clients. The effectiveness of this innovation was proved statistically, and the results were published in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling.
In addition, the Center for Teaching Excellence presented four Graduate Student Awards for Excellence in Teaching and also honored the Association of American Colleges and Universities K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders nominees and winner.