Six Professors Recognized With George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching

He said recognition from former students is pleasing, but
an important part of the feedback he gets from teaching
comes in the classroom, when he sees that students are interested
in the material — something that isn’t always
easy in mathematics.

“Many of my students are taking this as a required
course,” said Cox. “It’s my job to pass on
some of the beauty that mathematicians see in this material.”

He credits the quality of Rice’s students with a measure
of his success. They are smart and motivated to learn, which
makes it easier to draw them out in class.

“Without discussion, the material is too dry, and the
best discussions are led by students,” said Cox.

“I wanted to get a job where you got paid to write,
an activity to which I felt addicted,” said Davidson,
the Radoslav Tsanoff Professor in Public Affairs and professor
of sociology and political science. “True, you had
to teach to support your habit, but as soon as I began,
I found I like teaching too.”

Chandler said he got a “baptism by fire” when
he joined the Rice faculty in 1966. “Back in the heady
days of the ’60s, students thought sociology held the
key to the universe, so the introductory course on sociology
had two sections with a couple of hundred students each,
which concentrated my mind wonderfully.”

Nowadays Chandler teaches courses on social inequality,
political sociology and poverty — “subjects that
are dear to my heart,” he said.
A past recipient of the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence
in Teaching, Davidson said the most challenging aspect of
teaching is finding time to put a good course together while
also doing research to meet the demands of scholarship,
and he has sensed that other teachers have felt the same
frustration.

Learning how to write well is important because “an
unarticulated idea is not an idea,” he said. “If
you can’t express it, you don’t know it.”

Doody said his teaching method requires that his students
write six or seven papers a semester. His grading style
hasn’t varied since he started teaching at Rice in
1970, and he has maintained his “hard, but fair”
policy.

“I’ve tried in different ways to create a small
class atmosphere,” said Gustin.

One way he breaks down communication barriers is to meet
the students in the class in smaller groups. For instance,
he eats lunch with his students at each residential college
early in the semester.

Gustin said he’s rarely nervous in front of a crowd
but hadn’t done much teaching when he arrived at Rice
in 1988, and it showed. His early students were critical
of his disorganization in their evaluations, and Gustin
took the criticism to heart. He said he’s worked hard
over the years to create “a very organized course,
with clear expectations up front.” And while the course
is very demanding, he’s also worked hard to make it
fun.

Breaking up lectures with impromptu discussions about current
research is one way he keeps material fresh, and Gustin
said he’s tried a number of other techniques through
the years — not all of which worked.

One successful experiment that’s turned into a course
tradition is the live enactment of the digestive system.
Gustin divides the class by residential college into teams,
assigning each college a specific part of the digestive
system. Each team has to produce a five-minute skit that
portrays a part of the system.

She also says that to students in her psychology of gender
class. And to students in her research methods class.

Hebl can’t help it — she genuinely loves teaching.

The Radoslav Tsanoff Assistant Professor of Psychology always
has viewed teachers as role models and friends. In fact,
she still keeps in touch with her former mentors and visits
her kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers when
she goes home to Pardeeville, Wis.

Her goal as a teacher is to engage the students in the subject
matter, often through research and demonstrations in the
classroom. “I want to get them involved in the material
rather than have them just be passive recipients of my lectures,”
she said.

In her psychology of gender class, for example, an exercise
in which students retell a story to one another makes them
aware of gender stereotypes as they witness how the story
drastically changes as a function of whether the main character
is described as male or female. This demonstration was so
insightful that Hebl was able to get it published for the
student who came up with the idea in the journal Teaching
of Psychology.

Zammito said he enjoys teaching students and developing
complex narratives that are woven together for them during
the semester about European intellectual history.

Working with students individually is one of the best aspects
of teaching, he said.

“You get to understand what their interests and concerns
are and help them think through and articulate what they
want to know more about,” Zammito said.

He has taught history for 25 years, including 10 years at
Rice and also at The University of Texas at Austin and at
Houston’s St. John’s School. He previously has
received the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching
and the Nicholas Salgo Distinguished Teaching Award.