The Teach Better Podcast

Andrew Metrick is one of the best teachers in the Yale School of Management. In this episode he walks us through exactly how he co-taught a class on the Global Financial Crisis with former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, turned that course into a highly rated Coursera MOOC, and then used those resources to reinvent the in person class. Our conversation is chock full of practical advice for anyone who teaches online or in person.

In the second of a special two-part episode, we continue to reflect on what we've learned from the podcast about nine key questions all faculty face. In this episode we focus on the learner: How do you treat the student? How much choice do you give them? Who is responsible for engagement? Just as in part one, we've included lots of choice quotes from previous guests.

In the first of a special two-part episode, we reflect on what we've learned from the podcast about nine key questions all faculty face. In this episode we focus on the curriculum: what to teach, in what order, and how to adjust the teaching to the learner. We include lots of choice quotes from previous guests, so this is a great starting point for those new to the podcast.

Our guest is Julia Stephens from the Yale History Department and South Asian Studies Program. Julia both teaches and writes about South Asia, Islam, colonialism, family, the law and the Indian diaspora. In just two years at Yale she has built a reputation among the students for being a dynamic and effective lecturer. Julia succeeds by being creative, being open-minded, and most important, being herself.

Bonni Stachowiak teaches courses in business, marketing, leadership, and human resources at Vanguard University of Southern California where many of her students are freshmen. In this episode she talks with us about the issues and opportunities involved with teaching first year students. Bonni also hosts her own podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and shares some stories from behind the scenes.

Matt Croasmun directs the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and teaches a course with the same name in Yale College. Started by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, the course helps students engage with a big important question: What is a good life? In an especially wide ranging conversation, we talk with Matt about possible answers, how to go about finding an answer, and the nuts and bolts of teaching such an ambitious class.

Our guest is Michael Faison from the Yale Department of Astronomy. He teaches undergraduate classes that range from the search for extraterrestrial life to advanced radio astronomy, and he directs the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium where he often hosts classes. Outside Yale, he gives public lectures about astronomy, astrology, and the difference between the two. In this episode we talk about the advantages of teaching outside a traditional classroom, thinking creatively about what happens during class time, and how he handles students with very different backgrounds in science and math.

In this episode Parama Chaudhury joins us from University College London's Department of Economics. Parama is a teaching fellow at UCL where she does all sorts of innovative things in the classroom. We spend most of our time talking about Parama's experience with Team-Based Learning (TBL), but she also tells how she ended up starting the world's first Centre for Teaching and Learning in Economics.

In this episode we talk to Frank Robinson from Yale's Center for Teaching and Learning. Frank has a PhD in Applied Math and he works with a wide range of scientists at Yale co-teaching some of our most innovative classes. He shares what he learned flipping Fundamentals of Physics with Helen Caines, and also tells us about creating a public website (coming soon!) based on his Movie Physics class.

Geoff Connors is our first guest from the Yale School of Medicine. He's an assistant professor of pulmonology and teaches medical students how to reason and make decisions. He also teaches a class called 'Teaching Teachers' through the Med School's Teaching and Learning Center (not to be confused with the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning). In this episode Geoff explains how differently (and not so differently) education works in his world.

On this episode we are honored to talk to Professor of Psychology and President of Yale University, Peter Salovey. While President Salovey has held just about every high level position in the administration, he has also been one of Yale's most popular lecturers, and in fact still holds the record for largest lecture class ever taught at Yale with 1,052 students. During our conversation he tells us about that class (Psychology and the Law), teaching Intro Psych, his vision for the future of undergraduate education at Yale, and a whole lot more.

Noah Finkelstein has a BS in Math from Yale and a Phd in Applied Physics from Princeton. He started teaching physics and studying how to teach physics during post-docs at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. Now, he teaches physics and is a director at University of Colorado's Center for STEM Learning, and he thinks hard about how to induce and sustain improvements in teaching across the university. In our wide ranging conversation, Noah shares his deep insights into what happens and what should happen in the classroom and at the institutional level. This is a good one.

In this episode we're joined by Michael Honsberger, neuroscientist and STEM project manager for Yale's Young Global Scholar's Program. Michael has a background studying memory including a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and a postdoc in Yale's Division of Molecular Psychiatry. He talks to us about how we can use knowledge of how the brain works to become better teachers.

This episode is extra-special as we're joined not by any faculty, but instead by Maia Eliscovich-Sigal and Miguel Goncalves. Maia is a senior economics major here at Yale and Miguel is a senior global affairs major. They give us the students' perspective on their classes and tell us what they find works and doesn't work when professors lecture, organize discussions, and use technology.

Gerald Jaynes, Professor of Economics and African American Studies has been teaching fearlessly at Yale for more than 30 years. He currently teaches popular courses in the Economics of Discrimination, Poverty under Postindustrial Capitalism, and Social Science of the Black Community, and is always experimenting with new ideas in the classroom. Among many other things, we talk about the time he held an end-of-semester review session on the radio, the time he created and played an online banking game with 350 undergrads, and his recent experience teaching math to high school students using the Madden Football video game.