Steve M. Potter – Teaching

 

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In 2011, I won Georgia Tech’s top teaching award ($10,000), the Class of 1940 W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher award. Quoting from the GT Faculty & Staff Honors page: “Awarded to those who display teaching excellence, including extraordinary efforts in teaching, inspiration transmitted to students, direct impact and involvement with students, intellectual integrity and scholarship, and impact on post graduate success of students.”

In August, 2012 (Fiscal Year 2013), I won the University System of Georgia’s top teaching award ($5,000), the Regents’ Award for Excellence in Teaching for Research Universities. At the same time, my department, the Joint Georgia Tech/Emory Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, won the departmental version of this award from the Regents of the University System of Georgia, for our success with problem-based learning in classroom and laboratory environments. I was heavily involved in designing and testing the department’s PBL curricula (along with Wendy Newstetter, Barbara Fasse, and others) since I arrived at Georgia Tech in 2002. For example, I created the first PBL-style lab class for both undergraduates and graduate students (Neuroengineering Fundamentals/Hybrid Neural Microsystems).


Here is a 30-minute talk I gave at the 2021 Make:Education Forum about using real-world projects and problems to enhance motivation in students and teachers.

Here is a link to the slide deck (5MB PDF).


Front cover

How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning


(Click image to download pdf of front and back cover)
I have written a book about the REAL-WORLD Project-Based Learning approach that I developed for my classes. The book is now available at Amazon and other booksellers world-wide. You can find a summary here.


I presented my teaching innovations at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. See this poster:

SFN 2011 poster on Real World Teaching 23.12, ZZ11 Sat-Wed, Nov. 12-16

Introductory Neuroscience, BMED/BIOL 4752

Syllabus — Fall 2012

Examples of my students’ work:

Wikipedia Articles my students wrote

List of Neuro books my students reviewed on Amazon.com

YouTube video reviews of neuro articles by my students

Neuroengineering Fundamentals, BMED 4400

Syllabus — Spring 2011