Word: danforth
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...explain its functions, the staff of the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning shows videotapes of Harvard instructors that are all-too-familiar to students who have sat through incomprehensible and poorly delivered lectures or have tried to learn from nervous and unprepared section leaders. Some of the teachers who consented to be taped for an evaluation of their teaching ability are so bad they are almost humorous. An economics section leader tangles himself up hopelessly in supply-and-demand curves, stares pitifully at the blackboard and stumbles on through a now useless explanation. A French section leader twirls...
After section leaders have seen the first tapes of themselves during evaluation sessions with the staff and/or their departmental peers, the Danforth people retape them. On these tapes, the section leaders have abandoned nervous habits, their speech is more forceful and energetic, and their classes participate enthusiastically in discussion...
Dean K. Whitla, director of the Danforth Center, holds up these tapes as proof that the center's techniques improve teaching measurably. And he points to a packed schedule of taping and reviewing sessions that have spilled over to Sunday nights this semster as indication that more and more people at Harvard are coming to realize, albeit slowly, that the Danforth Center can work for them...
Hanify added he also believes "there is no uniform program, with the exception of the Danforth Center, to help teaching fellows teach...
...Danforth Center and the Bureau of Study Counsel offer programs for Faculty members similar to the new mini-course, Whitla said...