Better Teaching @ MIT during IAP 2010

"Better Teaching @ MIT" is a series of lunchtime workshops offered by TLL and designed to help MIT instructors teach better. During IAP 2010, we'll talk to some of MIT’s best teachers about how they teach, explain how to write homework problems and test questions to best support student learning and understanding, consider ways to engage students in classroom discussions, and explore other topics:

You may be also interested in these additional workshops offered during IAP 2010:

Tech's Top Teachers Talk Turkey / Mon Jan 25, 12-1 PM, location: TBD

Join us for a session in which some of MIT's best teachers — both faculty and teaching assistants — talk about how to teach well.

(return to top)

Interactive Teaching / Tues Jan 26, 12-1 PM, Location: 6-120

Dr. Sanjoy Mahajan (Associate Director, TLL)

By asking students questions based on key concepts, you engage students' interest and intelligence. You also learn what concepts they find most confusing. By having a whole class BE a demonstration, you can involve students even more in their learning. This session discusses the reasons for interactive teaching and provides examples of questions and techniques that you can use or adapt for your own teaching. (return to top)

Planning and Presenting a Lecture/ Wed Jan 27, 12-1 PM, location: 6-120

Dr. Sanjoy Mahajan (Associate Director, TLL)

This session will explore how to organize a lecture or recitation. It will help you understand how to craft the messages you are delivering and understanding how they affect your audience. By the end of the workshop, you will have a better sense of how to use more of your expressive capacity to keep a group engaged. (return to top)

Making the Most of Your Presentation / Wed Jan 28, 2-4 PM, location: TBD

Dr. Jean-luc Doumont, Communication Consultant

Strong oral presentation skills are a key to success for engineers, scientists, and other professionals, yet many speakers are at a loss to tackle the task. Systematic as they otherwise can be in their work, they go at it intuitively, sometimes haphazardly, with much good will but seldom good results. Based on Dr Doumont's book Trees, maps, and theorems about “effective communication for rational minds” this lecture proposes a systematic way to prepare and deliver presentations. Among others, it covers structure, slides, and delivery, as well as stage fright. This session is co-sponsored with the Graduate Students Office. (return to top)

Constructing Effective Problem Sets & Exam Questions / Thurs Jan 28, 12-1 PM, location: 6-120

Dr. Sanjoy Mahajan (Associate Director, TLL)

This session highlights ways in which exams, problem sets and homework assignments can be designed to best support student learning and understanding. Participants identify positive and negative attributes of sample homework problems and work collaboratively to redesign these problems in order to more effectively reinforce desired learning objectives. (return to top)

Structuring Your Scientific Paper / Thurs Jan 28, 2-4 PM, location: TBD

Dr. Jean-luc Doumont, Communication Consultant

Papers are one of the few deliverables of the work of researchers. 
Well-designed, they efficiently allow each reader to learn only what he or she needs to. Poorly designed, by contrast, they confuse readers, fail to prompt decisions, or remain unread. Based on Dr. Doumont's book Trees, maps, and theorems about "effective communication for rational minds," the lecture shows how to structure scientific papers, theses, and technical reports effectively at all levels to get the readers' attention, facilitate navigation, and, in this way, get the message across optimally. This session is co-sponsored with the Graduate Students Office. (return to top)

Special Considerations for Teaching in a Multicultural Classroom / Fri Jan 29, 12-1 PM, location: 6-120

Jane Dunphy (Director, English Language Studies Program)
Dr. Lori Breslow(Director, TLL)

MIT’s cultural diversity is an exciting resource. In this seminar, strategies are presented for discussion about ways to increase understanding in, and effective management of multicultural classrooms. (return to top)

Getting Messages Across with Graphs / Fri Jan 29, 2-4 PM, Location: TBD

Dr. Jean-luc Doumont, Communication Consultant

Although widely used in research to analyze data and to communicate about them, graphical displays are still poorly mastered by researchers, who often use the wrong graphs or use them in the wrong way (and popular software does not exactly help). Based on Dr. Doumont's book Trees, maps, and theorems about "effective communication for rational minds," this session discusses how to choose the right graph for a given data set and a given research question, how to optimize the graph's construction to reveal the data, and finally how to phrase a useful caption. This session is co-sponsored with the Graduate Students Office. (return to top)

How to Speak / Fri Jan 29, 2-3 PM, Location: 6-120

Professor Patrick Winston (Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science)

You can improve your speaking ability in critical situations by observing a few heuristic rules. Professor Winston's collection of rules is presented along with examples of their application not only in lectures, but also in job talks, thesis defenses, and oral examinations. (return to top)