Maria Molina-Domene
This year Maria was nominated by her department for the LSE Class Teacher Award and by her students for the ‘excellent feedback and communication’ LSE Students Union Award.
What do you enjoy most about working with students?
I find helping students in their learning process and facilitating their understanding of a subject really rewarding. This is especially the case when students tell me they have been inspired by the course and have decided to continue with the subject in postgraduate programmes or jobs.
What tips do you have for engaging students and ensuring they all participate in class?
The first thing is to create a good group dynamic. I try to learn students’ names as soon as possible and build up knowledge about them such as who’s more confident when it comes to answering questions and who needs some extra support participating in class. This helps to make communication smoother.
In terms of creating a more relaxed atmosphere, I always highlight the fact that we all make mistakes – including me! Making them is a normal part of a constructive learning process. As part of this, I always try and follow the students’ thoughts, instead of telling them the expected answer. Good ideas can get missed if we don’t listen to each other.In your nomination, the strong quality of your feedback was noted and appreciated by students.
Why do you think feedback is so important and what advice would you give for providing useful feedback?
I feel students appreciate the fact I conscientiously mark their problem sets and invite them to attend office hours. I do this because I think guidance early on is crucial – there is an initial step in the learning curve where we need somebody to advise us and explain the different points of view. Sometimes students find it hard to read the proposed solutions and understand where they’re missing the point. Students also noted your personal approach to teaching.
Why do you think it’s important to have this approach and build rapport with students?
Students are under a lot of pressure and I want them to feel they can open up to me and explain where they have difficulties, so I can help them. To do this I try and ensure the class and my office hours are enjoyable parts of the day.
Have you used an innovative/unusual teaching methods, if so what methods have you used and why?
Innovative sounds like a big word!
One of the things we’ve started is an anonymous forum – this allows students to ask questions and highlight areas they are unsure about or are finding difficult. The lecturer invested lots of time guiding and moderating the forum.
This has been successful as it allows students to interact with each other and contribute to each other’s learning processes. It’s been great to see students helping each other and finding unexpected ways to solve problems. These creative solutions have then triggered other ideas and inventive ways of looking at things.
What would you say is the hardest part of being a teacher?
Trying to reach every student. Every year I endeavour to achieve that goal.