Meredith Whitten
This year Meredith was nominated by her department for the LSE Class Teacher Award and by her students for the ‘inspirational teaching’ LSE Students Union Award.
Your students say you’re good at ensuring everyone participates in class – how do you do this?
I’m a huge proponent of active learning. A topic becomes real when you get your hands on it rather than just sitting back and listening.
I’m very aware of who’s participating in class and there’s always a student who’s more outspoken and a few who are quiet. To ensure students engage, I try and make the classroom comfortable and relaxed with a lot of humour.
I find if you randomly call on people they sometimes don’t show up the following week so I’ll involve students in non-threatening ways such as using them as scribes or using a student’s name in example situations we’re discussing - it’s amazing when I do this how quickly that student starts participating more!
We also do a lot of group work. I don’t let the students form groups with the same people each week and will come up with different reasons to put people together. For example, one week I’ll ask everyone who is a fan of Marmite to form a group. Another week I’ll ask everyone who’s visited Beijing to form a group. It forces students to interact differently so they don’t fall back into the same roles.
Your students find you friendly and approachable. How do you build rapport with them?
Well, I’m Texan and we think of ourselves as friendly people - maybe it’s because I say y’all a lot!
In all seriousness, we’ve all had that professor or heard that speaker who’s clearly very knowledgeable but is completely unapproachable.
The first step is to make a connection with the students and show them you’re excited to be there.
At the start of each class, I’ll do things like tell the students the score from my college football team’s game back home – it’s funny how many of my students are University of Texas football fans by the end of the course!
How do you balance your teaching and research responsibilities?
One of the things I’ve figured out is that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Spending time every week away from your research gives you a mental break that can make you feel reinvigorated when you return to it.
Are there other benefits to your PhD from teaching or vice versa?
I’m a slightly atypical PhD student in that I worked for 20 years beforehand. I worked mainly in public policy and economic development and I now teach an economic development course so I can often give very practical examples.
My research is on urban green space and I can tie that to any subject. So, in addition to learning to love University of Texas football, my students also grow to love green space. I’ve got students from years ago who’ll email me to say they visited a great park. It’s rewarding my research is still making an impression on them years later.
What techniques do you use to incentivise learning?
Every week I do a five question quiz on Moodle (true/false or multiple choice questions) that is designed to hit the high points of the material from the lecture. These questions aren’t assessed but are a way to check the students have understood the key concepts. To incentivise students I give out prizes at the end of each term. These are given to students who have performed the best but, as it’s actually the students who’re struggling who need to do the quizzes even more, I’ll also give out prizes for participation and someone will be crowned the ‘Moodle quiz winner’.
Every year I’ll invite some students from the previous year to give a quick overview of what it’s like to take the class from a student perspective. One of the students who came this year was our previous year’s quiz winner. He talked about the value of the tests and how they helped him when he was revising. It’s nothing earth shattering but it does seem to be helpful.
What makes a good teacher?
I think you have to be sincerely invested in what you’re teaching and in facilitating students’ learning. The students can tell if you don’t want to be there.
What is your teaching highlight?
I had one student who wasn’t a Geography student but took the class and was really involved. At the end of the year, he told me regional economic development was a subject he previously knew very little about but had developed an incredible passion for it and wanted to pursue it at Postgraduate level.
He said it was through being in the classes and making that connection between complex theories and how they affect people’s daily lives in practice that he discovered that passion.
That’s essentially why you teach - to instil passion and knowledge - and to have someone say “hey, you did that,” was very rewarding!