Teaching Development

I am continually evaluating myself and noting what good teachers do well and poor teachers do wrong. My CV outlines some of the courses and programs I have taken to improve my teaching. The example histogram below also shows one of the pieces of feedback from the middle-of-the-term term evaluations I administered for the Introductory Astronomy 101 class. The middle of the term evaluations are valuable for learning areas to improve before it is too late.

Despite the fact that many students take this class to get quantitative proficiency requirements fulfilled and may have a dislike for math, they were mostly neutral on the math difficulty level. The average value of 4.9 was even slightly below the neutral value of 5.5, suggesting that the subsequent classes can be pressed deeper into algebraic problem solving, especially if they are asked to go beyond their comfort zone.