Congratulations to
the 2013
Faculty Award
Winners
Faculty Awards for
Teaching Excellence
Winners:
Lynnda Brown
Dr. Kara Ryan-Johnson
Jim Elder
Mary Ellen Sullivan
Patty Smith
Glenn Jones
Tom Rowe
Part-Time Faculty
Awards for
Teaching Excellence
Winners:
James Price
Cheryl Lindle
Peter Kovaleski
Dianne Kirk
Part-time Faculty Awards for Teaching
Excellence Winners
Spotlight on Faculty Excellence
Dr. Rosemary Carlson, CELT Director at West Campus
As a college, each fall at convocation, we celebrate the talents of TCC faculty
with the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Teaching. To continue this recognition
throughout the school year, we will spotlight several of the award winners in each issue of the Celebrate Learning! newsletter. In this issue, we feature Tom Rowe (T.R.)
who teaches ESL classes at Northeast campus, Patty Smith (P.S.), who teaches biology
at West campus, Cheryl Lindle (C.L.) who teaches Sociology at Northeast Campus, and
James Price (J.P.) from Metro, where he teaches Math.
Q. What’s your most effective teaching strategy and why do you think it works?
J.P.: In teaching mathematics, you must have more than one method of explaining a
concept. Some students understand one method while others need another explanation on the same topic. I use the explanation from the text so that they can go back
and look at, but I also give them my own different take on a concept. I am a firm believer in homework. A student needs to work several problems in order to understand
basic concepts. I assign a lot of homework, but I grade it and get it back to them the
next class period.
P.S.: My most effective teaching strategies are field and museum experiences. In most
of my classes, we have field trips to native landscapes, such as the local Cross Timbers,
and visit museums, such as the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
C.L.: My most effective teaching strategy would be simply to engage the classroom through informal conversation. To talk with ~ not at ~ to connect and relate
material to their lives outside of school.
My job is to build trust so that students feel safe to open up and disclose, not just
with me but with each other. I bring many engaging, interactive activities to the classroom each session. Sometimes we use an actual structured activity, sometimes we engage in meaningful conversation that is emotional in nature.
Building trust is critical for students (in my opinion) ~ when this happens the
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