MIE’s Shannon Roberts Participates in 2025 Teaching Showcase

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Shannon Roberts

Associate Professor Shannon Roberts of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department recently took part in the 2025 Teaching Showcase, mounted by the UMass Amherst Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). As the CTL explains, it holds the annual event to celebrate “what colleagues across campus are doing to engage students, foster wellbeing, support student success, and more.” Specifically, Roberts participated in the “Sharing Showcase” phase of the event, in which she described her special teaching strategies for inspiring “student success with computational thinking” in her 150-student, sophomore-level, statistics course. 

The CTL calls its Teaching Showcase “a unique, lively, and inspiring event. At the center of the event, there is a Sharing Showcase, in which faculty from across campus share their teaching approaches.”

As Assistant Director Brian Baldi of the CTL said about Roberts, “As a former Lilly Fellow for Teaching Excellence, she was the perfect presenter — an exceptionally student-centered instructor who makes intentional teaching choices grounded in the literature on teaching.”

During the Sharing Showcase, Roberts imparted her teaching vision for her statistics course, which includes multiple assignments (readings, quizzes, homework, projects, exams) that assess students’ understanding of the material. See https://www.umass.edu/ctl/student-success-computational-thinking. 

According to Roberts, “I have a flipped-classroom wherein students watch videos before coming to class, so in-class time is focused on problem-solving. I even call them problem-solving sessions instead of lectures.” 

Roberts observed that “As the course is math- and equation-heavy, I make handouts with the equations for each session. Each handout also includes the problems we solve that day and, sometimes, graphics (e.g., a photo of the normal distribution), as well as statistical tables (e.g., z tables). The handouts are usually one page (double sided), which forces me to condense the information.” 

As Roberts tells her students on the first day of class each semester, the handouts are distributed at the beginning of every class. They include important terms, equations, and notes and are even posted before the class. She also adds context by informing her class that she originally developed the handouts because students requested them to help with understanding the material.

“I can tell [the handouts are] working,” said Roberts during the showcase, “because…students are allowed to bring a ‘cheat sheet’ to the in-class exam, and 95 percent of the cheat sheets are screenshots of my handouts. Students also come to office hours with the handouts and use them to explain concepts they are confused about or to relate the concepts on the handout to their homework.” 

As Roberts concluded in her Sharing Showcase presentation, “In short, students refer to the handouts in nearly all aspects of the class. One student loved the handouts so much that he asked me to provide them in three-hole-punch format so he can put them in a binder.” 

The CTL, created in 1986, says that it supports the professional development of faculty across all career stages and disciplines with programs and resources focused on course design, classroom instruction, curriculum development, and other forms of instructional support for faculty, departments, and the campus as a whole. (May 2025)