Taught Fall 2013 (1 section, 83 students), co-taught with Dr. Sarah Heckman
Taught Spring 2014 (1 section, 53 students), instructor
During Fall 2013, I co-taught a section of CSC 230 which met twice a week for 75 minutes, and taught my own section in Spring 2014. CSC 230 is a sophomore-level course required for all Computer Science majors as well as student pursuing a programming certificate or minor. CSC 230 is a large lecture course with over 60 students in a section, and also contains a sizable Distance Education cohort. CSC 230 teaches students their second programming language in the Computer Science program, the C language, which is a lower-level language than Java, which is taught first. This introduces them to lower-level computing concepts in order to prepare them for courses like Operating Systems. The course is heavily lecture based, with the bulk of the final grade on 3 examinations and 6 programming-intensive projects assigned for homework.
As co-teacher, I was responsible for leading the lecture for one of the two days each week, as well as holding office hours, monitoring the message board, and serving as head TA when it came to grading. The curriculum is planned in advance without much room for flexibility when the course is in full swing. Out of the six homework projects, I developed two of them, Homework 3 and Homework 4, which are included in the portfolio. The focus of the semester was to improve my comfort with lecturing as well as learning about the time commitments of trying to teach and pursue a research agenda at the same time. During my semester as a full instructor, I took on a heavier lecture load and also established an infrastructure for automated grading of student submissions using Github and Jenkins.
Taught Fall 2012 (2 sections, 12 and 17 students), led by Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill
Taught Spring 2013 (2 sections, 25 and 25 students), led by Dr. Tao Xie
Application of product engineering methods to software: quality assurance, project management, requirements analysis, specifications, design, development, testing, production and maintenance.
During Fall 2012 and Spring 2013, I led two sections of the lab component of CSC 326 which met every Thursday for 110 minutes each. CSC 326 is a junior-level course required for all Computer Science majors divided into a lecture and a lab section. The purpose of the lab section is to give students the opportunity to apply the concepts they learn in lecture to a large software project called iTrust. All homework assignments, which were usually broken into broad week-long tasks, were assigned through the lab section.
The activities for each lab session were determined in advance and tightly coupled with the learning objectives in the course, so my responsibility was to facilitate the lab activities and help students with both technical and conceptual issues. While I did not have the freedom to choose the activities, I did have the freedom to lead the activities as I pleased, and I took advantage of these opportunities to apply what I had learned in the FIT workshops I attended - particularly trying out different classroom assessment techniques.
As most of my responsibility in the lab came from positioning the course content in the broader scope of my students' curriculum, the artifacts below demonstrate the goals I had in mind when each session started, and how I ended up displaying them on the slides that stood at the front of the room as students worked on their daily assignments. One feature that I added on my own initiative was the daily "food for thought" slide that was displayed on the projector before each class session, highlighting a professor in the department and asking a question about how a student would approach their research. My goal was to get students to think about their work in a broader context than they would if we focused exclusively on the subject matter and exercises.
Coordinated Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 (3 meetings each)
The Current Issues in Teaching Reading Group is three-part series where graduate students with an interest in teaching come together to discuss scholarly articles related to research in teaching. The Reading Group is designed to build on the skills introduced in the Fundamentals in Teaching workshops, offering students and post-docs the chance to critically analyze the current research in the field.
The FIT Reading Group is an initiative that I started as part of the pilot of NC State's Preparing Future Leaders Ambassadors program. Offered formally through the Fundamentals in Teaching Program and coordinated with Dr. Barbi Honeycutt, the Reading Group is designed to bring together Graduate Students and Postdocs with an interest in teaching to discuss the state of the art in educational research.
The Fall 2012 Reading Group focused on research in assessment and evaluation, and the Spring 2013 Reading Group focused on games and social media. Each semester, we met once per month for three months and discussed the paper in the same manner as a reading session that would be coordinated by a professor for the students in his or her lab.