Senior Instructor Teresa Foley is one of three winners of the 2019 ذكذكتسئµ Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy Award. In her nomination letter, Dr. Foley was praised for the extensive contributions she has made to teaching in IPHY and campus-wide. Applying her expertise on how students learn as well as her passion for undergraduate education, she has made profound contributions to improving the IPHY curriculum, directly or indirectly benefiting more than a thousand students.
The impact of Dr. Foley's work extends throughout the IPHY program, having helped develop learning goals for 14 courses. Among her other accomplishments, she revitalized the Human Physiology and Cell Physiology labs from a traditional approach (where students follow pre-determined instructions) to a more inquiry-based design (where students design their own experiments). She also helped design the curriculum for Introduction to Epidemiology, one of two required courses for the Undergraduate Certificate in Public Health.
Dr. Foley has taught both small and large enrollment courses within and outside her expertise, earning praise from students and colleagues alike for her teaching, which skillfully interweaves student interaction with content delivery, making full use of evidence-based "best practices" from education research. Beyond the classroom, she serves as a Department Education Specialist, working closely with faculty to apply these insights toward the improvement of teaching effectiveness throughout the IPHY curriculum.
Currently, Dr. Foley is teaching both Immunology and Endocrinology while working on several pedagogy projects. With Senior Instructor Janet Casagrand, she is developing a map of the IPHY curriculum which will enable the Department to ensure each course in the sequence properly builds upon a student's prior coursework. Dr. Foley also participates in an Introductory Sequence Review Committee charged with recommending an introductory course sequence for the new IPHY major, which has already begun to take shape. She is also part of the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) Initiative on campus, which aims to develop and adopt a new framework for supporting and assessing teaching.
For this award, the selection committee looks closely at the nominee's pedagogy, especially innovative practices, with an emphasis on actual classroom teaching and pedagogy. Nominations require letters of support from students, as well as both internal and external letters of support from colleagues. .