Graduate students win 'Great Ideas in Teaching' awards

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By Communications Staff
Friday, February 18, 2011
Christina Castellani and Andrea Wishart, two graduate students from Biology, were teaching assistants who wanted their students to do something different for the presentation portion of the genomics course tutorial.
 
“So instead of sitting through typical presentations where they stand up in front of the room and just list off their facts, we thought that we would make it more fun, interactive and a better review session for them” says Wishart. “We had them do infomercials and try to sell their genomic product …They could be as creative as they wanted.”
 
 
Christina Castellani and Andrea Wishart

This innovation had earned the pair one of five awards in the ‘Great Ideas for Teaching’ competition 2011. The prize was part of the Winter Conference on Teaching (for Graduate Students) presented by the Teaching Support Centre.
 
Also winning awards were Chelsea Hicks (Biology), Silke Dennhardt (Health and Rehabilitation Sciences), Laura Murphy (Sociology) and Andrew Jun (Clinical Anatomy).
 
Castellani and Wishart introduced their class to the project by staging an infomercial of their own. They were ‘selling’ a DNA microarray chip by incorporating “the really corny typical infomercial things like the 1-800 number and prices,” says Wishart.  
Over the next week the students prepared their ads for presentation and they were, according to Wishart, “absolutely brilliant.”

Part of the success of this tutorial was due to the timing.   
 
“We had a couple of months with them,” says Castellani, “where group work was established with these students… the idea went over really well because it was the end of the semester and we knew them very well.”   
 
Encouraging creativity allowed students to interject humour into the tutorial, “the ideas were hilarious,” says Castellani, but each group included considerable, “research and the appropriate pricing for whatever their genomic technique was.”

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