Today's Guest Blogger is Christian Wright, an instructional professional in the School of Life Sciences as ASU. He has a Master’s in Education and a Ph.D. in Biology where he studied the interaction between physiological condition, environment, and foraging behavior of Gila monsters in Dr. Dale DeNardo’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. Additionally, he was a postdoctoral research scholar in Dr. Sara Brownel l ’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. His current research is a continuation and extension of research he worked on with Dr. Brownell in her lab and focuses specifically on 1) generating a validated general biology programmatic assessment, 2) exploring potential biases in undergraduate biology classrooms as well as examining mechanisms and interventions that may explain and alleviate said biases, 3) evaluating assessments used by undergraduate biology instructors and by biology education researchers to determine if these measurement tools are indeed

How do you feel now that the semester is almost over?  Our final TeachT@lk Webinar for 2015 was a terrific way to wrap up the year. So often we are overwhelmed with grading, and just submit grades and walk away, never thinking about the course until we teach again. This is not an effective way to end the semester, and loses some great opportunities to reflect on your course and make improvements for the next time you teach. Dr. Peter van Leusen shared 7 Action Tips for wrapping up the semester.  They included: Collect student feedback Get student permissions for exemplary work Archive important information on your course Document the experiences from student interactions and reactions to assignments Get additional feedback from peers, TAs and Instructional Designers Prioritize and make a plan for any changes Take action now to prepare for next semester Participants went through this worksheet , and took time to write comments about their courses for each of the tips.