There is so much about academia that is grounded in competition and opportunity-hoarding. Doctoral programs can be cutthroat, pitting students against each other to compete for funding and opportunities. The job market is… well, let’s not even go there. And then there’s the mad race of the tenure track, if you can get on it…
Tag: Teaching
Creative Science Communication: Student-Centered Project Development and Assessment
The following essay appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of the Division on Women & Crime newsletter, available HERE. You can find my guidelines for my science communication project HERE. “So, you let students choose their own project and make their own grading rubric?” I could hear the note of incredulity in my friend’s voice,…
Creating Mock “RFPs” for Undergraduate Research Methods
This week I tweeted a few thoughts on my approach to teaching our undergraduate “Research Methods in Sociology” and the positive response encouraged me to do a slightly more detailed write-up here. Before I launch into that, a bit of background. I teach at small university that feels more like a SLAC. We are primarily…
Real-world writing assignments: Resources for instructors
My little department is at a point of inflection. We have seen many retirements in the last few years and a couple of new hires — myself included! We also decided to turn our criminal justice concentration into an entire major and change our department name. We are now the Department of Sociology & Criminal…
Just a thin excuse for eating a whole lotta chocolate: M&M sampling exercise
This year I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a sampling demonstration with candy! It went really well, so I figured I’d write it up in case anyone else needs a bit of motivation. First, I want to recognize the two “pushes” that finally encouraged me to…
A Summer Syllabus
I admit it: I am not very organized. I am definitely a planner, but these plans usually exist in my head, on my Google calendar, or on various Post-Its scattered across at least three different working spaces in two cities. I have a lot of big ideas, but very rarely sit down and actually plot them…
Crime Mapping
Like many (most?) PhDs, I did not receive any formal training in teaching during my graduate studies. The teaching preparation in my program, at the time, was pretty much trial-by-teaching. Once we had completed our non-dissertation coursework, we could teach a course as a graduate instructor. We were paired with a supervising professor, given a…
A Second and Still Incomplete List of Criminal Justice Podcasts
It has been a little bit more than a year since I published A Most Definitely Incomplete List of Podcasts for Criminal Justice Classes, and since then podcasts have only become more popular – especially podcasts about crime. Science communication experts are constantly pressing the importance of story or narrative for conveying information, and that…
A Most Definitely Incomplete List of Podcasts for Criminal Justice Classes
A recent discussion in the Facebook group “Teaching with a Sociological Lens” (which is a fantastic group that I highly recommend!) reminded me of how much I love to use podcast episodes in place of or alongside reading assignments when I teach criminal justice topics. Actually, podcasts are just one of many different things that…
Using Google Forms for Midsemester Evaluations
I use mid-semester evaluations to get student feedback not only on my teaching, but on their preparedness and engagement in the course. I find that students often have constructive advice about improvements I could easily make (“more discussion,” “more group activities”) and can be quite introspective about their own performance in the class (“I should…