Professor Tina Chow was selected for UC Berkeley’s Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times award, which recognizes faculty, staff and student instructors who in 2020 embraced the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and engaged in or supported excellent teaching. The award recipients used innovative methods and worked beyond their traditional roles to ensure that students remained engaged and supported, and were challenged to do meaningful work under extraordinary circumstances.
The awardees include individuals from 32 departments representing a range of disciplines and academic areas as well as teams composed of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student instructors. Campus received almost 500 nominations for this award, signifying how our community has embraced the instructional challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to support our students.
Professor Chow has been an invaluable resource to CEE as we navigated the transition to remote instruction. She offered three workshops on remote instruction for faculty colleagues to help them prepare for the fall 2020 semester. She also presented these ideas to GSIs through her pedagogy course. For her technical course, she "flipped" her class and pre-recorded lectures, then used class time to engage with students. Chow also changed her grading scheme following a “Grading for Equity'' training, to make it flexible and emphasize learning.
While the abrupt shift to online learning posed numerous challenges for us all, Chow developed multiple tools that have worked so well that she will continue to use them even with the return to in-person instruction.
Congratulations, Tina!