Teaching
UT Dell Medical School - Year 1 Essentials: PILLARS Cells to Population
Semester: Summer 2023
Offered: 2023
Year 1: Essentials - PILLARS Cells to Populations Course. Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. Link
Students engage in problem-based learning throughout the first year using an activity called PILLARS: professionalism, inquiry, learning and leadership through active reasoning and synthesis. In PILLARS, students review cases weekly in small teams of six to eight and collaborate to identify the science underlying the patient’s disease. Then, they research the patient’s condition in self-directed time to address their own questions before rejoining the group to discuss findings.
In Cells to Populations, students investigate case-based clinical manifestations of human disease by integrating the disciplines of genetics, biochemistry and cell biology; normal cell structure and function; and physiology and pharmacology. Unlike traditional medical school courses in these disciplines, the Dell Med approach uses the lens of disease development including psychosocial and population-based effects. Congenital, hematological and oncological diseases receive a particular focus. Half of the coursework takes place in PILLARS case exploration and half occurs in full cohort sessions guided by faculty experts.
[Student Evaluation of Instructor: 4.47/5.00]
EDC 370E: Mathematics Methods
Role: Teaching Assistant
Semester: Spring
Offered: 2023
Curriculum content and organization, teaching procedures, materials, and research in elementary school subjects (Mathematics). Three lecture hours a week for one semester, including field hours in elementary schools.
In this course, we explore what it means to learn and teach mathematics with understanding, and how we can help students from diverse cultural, racial, social, and linguistic backgrounds appreciate its beauty and power. We pay particular attention to how children think about mathematics and learn to use what we know about children’s thinking to design and adapt instructional tasks. We consider students’ home and community-based experiences and how we can leverage these experiences to teach mathematics. In addition, we discuss the roles of students and teachers in the classroom, and how to foster an equitable classroom environment that encourages rich discussion of mathematics. We specifically address issues of power, access, diversity, and relevance in learning and teaching mathematics. Finally, we understand how the learning environment can support the development of all students’ mathematical ideas, and how activities and classroom practices can be structured to elicit, develop, and enhance student thinking.