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Turner College's Joshua Brooks Named Finalist for 2026 CSU Excellence in Teaching Award

The development of high-impact teaching practices has played a significant role in Turner College finance professor Joshua Brooks' approach to teaching, leading in part to his recent nomination for the 2026 CSU Excellence in Teaching Award. One of these involves metacognition, or how we think about our own learning. Brooks encourages his students to evaluate their study habits and presuppositions about learning, as many students have false beliefs in both areas. He also explains that almost every academic area can be learned with the right type of practice. Here, he explains how to scaffold into being proficient at the skills necessary for 
the class. Another practice involves interactions. "Online teaching affords a number of ways to facilitate student-student and student-instructor interaction. I work to rapidly answer inquiries inside and outside the LMS and email. This gives students a wide variety of communication channels. In problem-solving oriented classes, I usually use short videos to illustrate computational strategies. Since COVID-19, I’ve built an expanding library of how-to videos for use in my classes. The driver for many of these was student questions. Once I received a question, I made a video and posted it to YouTube then linked it to my LMS course. Other courses benefit from longer-form videos," Brooks explained.
Brooks adds that a glaring gap in many computational classes is the ability to practice problems in a low-stakes environment. To this end, his computational courses all include ungraded practice questions, many of which offer detailed, step-by-step feedback. Once students are ready to take a graded assignment, they can often complete multiple attempts on algorithmically generated question sets. This allows them to build confidence and “muscle memory” for solving problems that will be similar to those shown on an exam. Lastly, Brooks explains that longer-form assignments are a great opportunity for students to work on project that mirror many of the of the assignments they will have on the job. Often students are not accustomed to the format or the style of writing in a professional setting. "To remediate their skills in this area, most of my projects involve multiple deadlines and multiple drafts or phases of projects. The rough draft feedback is also something I use in the financial crisis presentations mentioned previously. Whenever applicable, I have students work off of real-world databases," he concluded. Turner Business congratulates Professor Brooks on this achievement and wishes him the best moving forward.
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