The winners of the 2022-23 Teaching Assistant Awards have been announced, and two graduate students from the School of Education are among the honorees.
UW–Madison employs over 2,300 teaching assistants (TAs) across a wide range of disciplines. Their contributions to the classroom, lab, and field are essential to the university’s educational mission. To recognize the excellence of TAs from across campus, the Graduate School, College of Letters & Science (L&S), and Morgridge Center for Public Service sponsor these annual awards.
Yeyu Wang and Kelsey Schenck, both PhD students in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, are among this year’s award winners.
Wang has received the Early Excellence in Teaching Education Award. Wang has a passion for developing research methodologies to analyze multimodal data through learning activities, with the goal of fair and efficient assessments.
While teaching, Wang focuses on providing timely feedback, encouraging questions, sincerity, and positivity.
When asked about her teaching style, Wang says, “I push them out of their cognitive comfort zone but make this experience joyful by encouraging and giving them credit when solving problems on their own.”
Schenck has received the Capstone PhD Teaching Award. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology’s learning sciences area. Her research focuses on the cognitive and affective spatial processes that impact students’ mathematical thinking and gestures as they reason about geometry.
Schenck’s teaching philosophy includes three main goals: to deliver knowledge to students while generating excitement and interest, to help students develop effective collaboration and communication skills, and to encourage interaction and incorporate a variety of perspectives.
She states: “To accomplish these goals, I draw on my background as a K-12 teacher and as a student myself to craft opportunities for my students to engage deeply with the content and forge meaningful connections within the context of their personal lives.”
Learn more about Wang, Schenck, and the other 2022-23 honorees.