Friday @ the Center
April 23, 2010
TOY Award: School of Psychology, Family, and Community
*The fourth in a series featuring this year’s eight nominees for the SPU Faculty Teacher of the Year award.*
Dr. M. Kathleen B. Lustyk has taught upper-division psychology courses and graduate level courses in the Department of Psychology since 1996, including Psychobiology of Women, Physiological Psychology, and Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience. She also regularly mentors students doing research in women’s health issues, one of her particular passions. Over the past six years, six SPU doctoral students and twenty-three undergraduates have performed and published professional-level research with Kathy. One of her students wrote this fall, “Dr. Lustyk is an amazing professor! I wish that she taught more classes. My favorite thing about Dr. Lustyk and this class was the passion and excitement which she teaches with. I absolutely loved going to class everyday because the lectures were so interesting and relevant to everyday life. She always managed to make even difficult scientific concepts easy to understand.” Here we witness how an engaging teacher can stimulate student engagement, which leads to learning. |
 Dr. Kathy Lustyk |
Talking About Writing
As the fourth week of the quarter comes to end, you may be dealing with responding and/or evaluating student writing. Professor Tom Amorose, Director of Campus Writing, has provided some helpful concepts for talking about writing with your students: consider Global Traits (the “real” basics), Individual Traits, and Conventions. Global Traits are the most important and should be the starting place for your comments. Global Traits consist of the completeness and development of the topic, the organization or coherence of the paper, and the success of the paper in accomplishing its purpose. Individual Traits, a second layer, includes accuracy, economy, considering the audience, an appropriate voice, and an authentic tone. Finally, Conventions cover grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style. Correcting a few errors in convention and writing “good job” on an essay is not a helpful learning procedure, but I’m afraid I sometimes hear students reporting that this is the kind of feedback they get.
Undergraduates and Graduate School
Please remember to encourage appropriate undergraduates to attend the Center’s annual informational session, “Is Graduate School for You?” on Thursday, April 22, from 1-1:50 p.m. in Demaray Hall 255. This is a basic introduction for those in the early stages of considering graduate education, covering issues such as “How do I know I can do graduate level work? What can you do in your sophomore and junior year to better prepare yourself for graduate school? What’s the difference and advantages/disadvantages between a M.A. and a Ph.D? How do you decide where to apply?”
Happy Teaching,
Susan Susan VanZanten |
