Congrats to Josh Weber for earning a College of Letters & Science Academic Staff Teaching Excellence Award!
Sometimes, the path to teaching excellence is swift and measured. Despite joining the instructional team in the Department of Physics just four short years ago, Joshua Weber has already made his mark, impressing both his colleagues and the students he teaches.
Weber is the course manager and primary instructor for Physics 201 and 202, the two-semester introductory courses taken by nearly 1,000 future engineering students. He has worked closely with his teaching assistants — the same teaching assistants who compete to work with him and whose classes he steps in to cover when they’re ill or indisposed — to adapt traditional physics labs into structured quantitative labs, in which students focus on building lab skills that allow them to “think like scientists” instead of just reproducing results they’ve seen in class. Weber views his role as an instructor as a facilitator, creating a welcoming environment that sparks collaborative learning.
He’s clearly winning the hearts and expanding the minds of his students. As one student recently shared with one of Weber’s TAs:
“Josh is really nice and a great instructor. He led my discussion section once, and I felt nervous, because I felt kind of rusty on the chapter we were working on. But he said, ‘I’m a lot more scared of you than you are of me’ kind of as a joke, and it set the tone for the class and didn’t make it feel like our big scary professor was going to run the discussion section and eat us alive for not being an expert on the material.”
