The Chronicle of Higher Education informa en su edición de hoy, 16 noviembre 2007, del otorgamiento de los premios otorgados por el Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) y la Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching a los mejore sprofesores universitarios del año en los Estados Unidos de América:
–Rosemary M. Karr of Collin County Community College in Plano, Tex., won in the category of community colleges.
–Glenn W. Ellis, an associate professor of engineering at Smith College, was honored in the baccalaureate-college category.
–Carlos G. Spaht, a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University at Shreveport, took the prize in the category of master’s colleges and universities.
–Christopher M. Sorensen, a distinguished professor of physics at Kansas State University, won in the category of doctoral and research universities.
Este interesante reportaje (ver texto completo más abajo) revela cómo estos profesores premiados logran hacer relevantes sus clases para los alumnos y motivarlos en el estudio.

‘Professors of the Year’ Gauge Best Ways to Inspire Students to Learn Technical DisciplinesBy PAULA WASLEY
At a time when mathematics, science, and engineering education is frequently described as in crisis, four professors are being honored for their work teaching those subjects, often to student populations typically seen as phobic of such technical disciplines.
At a ceremony on Thursday in Washington, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named this year’s national “Professors of the Year.”
The four professors were chosen from among 300 candidates nominated by their institutions, with each winner representing one of four categories— baccalaureate colleges, community colleges, master’s institutions, and Ph.D.-granting universities. The awards recognize the winners’ “influence on teaching and outstanding commitment to undergraduate students.”
The honored professors may differ in their classroom techniques. One encourages students to jump off tables. Another hands out dollar bills. But all agree on the fundamentals of successful teaching: Make your subject relevant to your students, and then give them the passion and skills to take learning into their own hands.
Rosemary M. Karr of Collin County Community College in Plano, Tex., won in the category of community colleges.
As a professor of developmental math, Ms. Karr deals every day with students’ deep-rooted fear of mathematics. To counter it, she created a program, called “Passport,” that allows students to learn at whatever pace they chose.
Often her students already have a good general grasp of college-level algebra, but struggle with one or two particular concepts, she said. In sessions of her Passport courses, Ms. Karr and another professor give students a choice of eight minilectures on concepts like factoring, exponents, or functions. Students attend the four lectures they think will help them most and can repeat a subject area as often as they like, until it clicks. At the end of the session, students write down whether they understood the material so the professors can design the lectures for the next session.
In traditional courses, said Ms. Karr, teachers are constrained by a syllabus drawn up before the first day of class. “You’re stuck teaching that, regardless of who’s in your class, because you have to meet the curriculum,” she said. But in Passport, she can tailor the course to students’ individual needs, without holding up the whole class, or leaving someone behind. That approach, she said, provides “the opportunity to accelerate without forced acceleration,” and so far it has achieved impressive results. Students in her Passport courses had 15-percent higher success rates in beginning algebra that did students enrolled in the standard course, and were more likely to pass subsequent college-level math courses. Best of all, she said, the program teaches students to take responsibility for their own learning.
To put math in context for students, Ms. Karr looks for real-world applications for the concepts they study. She kicks off discussions of mathematical concepts with questions like: “Did you know the shape of a pill affects how quickly it dissolves in your system?” Or she asks students to conceive of algebraic functions as the creamy filling within the shell of a Godiva chocolate. The students laugh, she said, but they learn too.
Glenn W. Ellis, an associate professor of engineering at Smith College, was honored in the baccalaureate-college category.
Much of what Mr. Ellis knows about pedagogy he learned early in his career, as a schoolteacher. In a high-school or elementary-school setting, he said, standard format lectures just don’t work. There, the smaller, more interactive classes forced him to constantly adapt his teaching tactics to the dynamics of the class. “I know something good is happening if I’m learning at the same time my students are,” he said.
Another thing he discovered: The first five minutes of class are critical. That’s why he starts each class with a provocative question. He recently began a physics lecture by placing a piece of Styrofoam between two tables and asking students if they would walk across it. When they all refused, he had them consider how they knew this was a bad idea. His aim, he said, was to show them that they already had a deep understanding of the interplay of engineering principles like geometry, material behavior, and weight loading. All that was left, he said, was to acquire the math that would help them explain what they knew.
In his eight years at Smith, Mr. Ellis has helped develop the first engineering curriculum designed specifically for women, one that has been widely recognized as a model for improving engineering education. His classes have focused on integrating engineering within the traditional liberal-arts curriculum which, he hopes, will encourage students to make connections between their subjects.
So, a class on artificial intelligence also became a lesson on philosophy and the nature of language. By using ambiguous sentences to try to determine if an unknown instant-message respondent was a human or robot, Mr. Ellis’s students learned about syntax and semantics, and about the limits of machine intelligence. In his course on continuum mechanics, students worked in teams to produce educational videos. The project not only incorporated elements of engineering and literary concepts like storytelling, but also made students more conscious of how they and their peers learned.
Carlos G. Spaht, a professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University at Shreveport, took the prize in the category of master’s colleges and universities.
Mr. Spaht learned he had a knack for teaching 35 years ago as an Army intelligence officer. While instructing colleagues on subjects like how to clean a gun, he said, he discovered that teaching was stimulating. “I enjoy teaching so much,” he said, “I get this high energy when I get in the classroom.” (Grading tests is another matter, he said.)
Today, Mr. Spaht is known for energizing his students with his enthusiastic gesturing, praise, and occasional financial rewards. “I’ll take a student and I’ll call his name in the middle of the class. We’ll talk about what he’s doing. I’ll say, ‘That’s outstanding.’ Sometimes I’ll give him a dollar bill.” Mr. Spaht keeps a lot of small bills in his wallet.
Beyond being a powerful participation incentive, money helps students connect math with real life. He emphasized that connection in a program he helped create that teaches students and their teachers at inner-city high schools and middle schools about money management, financial planning, and investment strategies, and how to interpret the tiny print in the stock tables in The Wall Street Journal.
That initiative, called Financial Independence for Life, is one of three precollege outreach programs Mr. Spaht developed for Shreveport students.
He is proudest of a two-year summer program called LaPREP that prepares middle and high-school students for college-level math, science, and engineering. Of the 450 students who have participated in LaPREP, he said, 90 percent were minority students, and most were female and from disadvantaged neighborhoods. However, he has yet to have a student drop out, he said. All those who have graduated from high school have gone on to college, and 85 percent have majored in math, science, or engineering.
Since his Army days, Mr. Spaht has become skilled at reading his students and finding a teaching style that best suits each group. In the same course, he said, one section may respond better to a lecture format, while another does better with small-group activities. One group may need more encouragement, while another could benefit from a little gentle scolding. “I try to engage all learning styles, stay flexible in the classroom, and set up unique situations where real learning can take place,” he said.
His advice to new teachers: Communicate with your students and build a nurturing relationship with them. Learning will follow.
Christopher M. Sorensen, a distinguished professor of physics at Kansas State University, won in the category of doctoral and research universities.
Mr. Sorensen has several tricks up his sleeve for getting his students’ attention. One is a maneuver he calls the “traverse.”
“I hate the fact that I’m down there at the lecture table and they’re up there in the auditorium,” he said. So Mr. Sorensen spends his classes walking all over the lecture hall. He doesn’t just pace up and down the aisles, mind, but ventures into the rows. Sometimes he steps on a few feet, he says, but the tactic has done wonders for eliminating the physical and mental gap between students and professor.
His goal, he says, is to make students understand that physics is all around them. To get there, he tries to pitch his classes to an audience that is not naturally scientifically inclined. When preparing his lectures, he says, he thinks of his sisters— a historian and a social worker— and how they would respond to the lesson.
For a two-semester course on engineering physics, Mr. Sorensen designed 130 dramatic laboratory demonstrations for small groups of students.
One experiment involved having students jump off a table while holding a paper cup of water poked with holes, so they could observe a split second of zero gravity as the water stopped flowing from the holes.
Mr. Sorensen is also not shy about using personal anecdotes to illustrate scientific principles. There was, for example, the time he told his class about speeding down a Colorado mountain in his sports car and, in the process, burning out his brakes and alienating his girlfriend. The personal detail, Mr. Sorensen says, improved his rapport with the students. More important, it helped them remember how kinetic energy transforms into heat energy.
In his Physics 101 class, Mr. Sorensen replaces a third of the standard physics textbook readings with the original works of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, and Einstein. Reading those texts, he says, gives students a sense of where science came from and how it developed. He hopes it will also infect them with a passion for discovery.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s about being a dorky physicist or about studying art history,” he said. “I want to show them that it’s OK to be passionate about something and display that in public.”
Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education