Texas Tech University

Hidden Gems 2022

Each year, the Texas Tech Teaching Academy recognizes the Hidden Gems: faculty and staff who go above and beyond in fostering student success. The following are Arts & Sciences' Hidden Gems for 2022:

Rula Al-Hmoud

TTU faculty Rula Al-Hmoud

Lecturer of Arabic
Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures (CMLL)

Nominated by Donovan Satchell:

"Going beyond the Texas Tech standard, Professor Al-Hmoud has positively influenced me during my time here, allowing me to soar and reach new heights of achievement. As a first-generation student, fear of the unknown—walking into a classroom on the first day—accumulated many negative feelings. Seeing the glow of Professor Al-Hmoud as she entered the classroom brought a sense of peace that cannot be put into words but has to be experienced. Her hard work and personal dedication to ensure that I did not feel like a number set the precedence for my time at Texas Tech. She opened her office to me not only for tutoring, mentoring, or asking a question about the Middle East; it was a safe space for vulnerability. In a time of strife, Professor Al-Hmoud took her time to ensure that my mental well-being was cared for. She set aside her duties as a professor, student, and mother to seek my needs. Her selfless act of care put me on track to where I am today.

"Due to me having a job and being a student, tutoring was not always feasible during the weekdays. Professor Al-Hmoud would meet me on campus during the weekend, even during an early morning Zoom call to ensure that I was successful in her course. The class was not easy by any means, but she provided me with the resources and took time to slowly explain the content so that I was successful in her class. After joining her study abroad trip to Jordan, she became a mentor for my career in diplomacy. Once COVID hit, I unfortunately became sick. I reported my results to the school, which prompted the alert to my professors. Out of the five professor I had at the time, Professor Al-Hmoud was the only one that genuinely cared for my health. She would send check-up emails to make sure I was doing well. She was not focused on me completing class work while I was ill, she was more concerned about my recovery. Inserting kindness in small ways can have a big impact. Her check-up emails were the only joy that I was able to experience while I was sick. She knew that I was unable to leave my home, so she cooked my favorite dish from the study abroad trip and set it on my porch. Her knowledge and passion for teaching is ultimately what inspired me to pursue a career in diplomacy. She looked over all of my graduate school and fellowship applications. During moments of doubt, her encouragement always reminded me of what I am fighting for. I have been selected for the prestigious Thomas R. Pickering Fellowship through the U.S. Department of State. As the first student from Texas Tech to receive this honor, I credit Professor Al-Hmoud for her encouragement and mentoring. With the fellowship, I will become a U.S. Diplomat in 2024. As a senior graduating this May, I have never encountered a professor as kind, selfless, and caring as Professor Al-Hmoud.

"As I reflect on my time at Texas Tech, I would be remised if I did not credit Professor Al-Hmoud for opening the door of possibility for me. When a person sees past the surface to look at the heart, their impact lasts a lifetime."

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Britta Anderson

TTU professor Britta Anderson

Assistant Professor of Spanish
CMLL

Nominated by Sara Guengerich:

"I would like to nominate my colleague, Dr. Britta Anderson, assistant professor of Spanish, to be recognized as a “Hidden Gem.” Since her arrival to Texas Tech and her home department, CMLL, in 2019, she has gone above and beyond in all areas of her academic life. As a faculty member, she has participated actively in all teaching and professional development programs available to her, including numerous teaching workshops at the TLPDC, the Institute of Inclusive Excellence, and the Teaching Mentoring through Peer Observation (TEMPO) program. Teaching during the pandemic, all the skills she learned in these professional workshops translated into the improvement of her remote, hybrid and face-to-face courses and promoted students' engagement and well being. For example, her online courses incorporated relevant tools to allow human-to-human interactions (i.e. FlipGrid) and music at the top of every class, with themes relevant to the day's content. Despite the limitations afforded by online teaching, Dr. Anderson made herself available to her students. She gave generously of her time to meeting her students one-on-one, regularly. Her concern and care for them meant a lot for many of her students dealing with mental health issues. Her hybrid and face-to-face courses are true favorites among language students as she implements creative assignment options such as podcasts, visual art interpretations, and digital stories. At the graduate level, she performs at her best in her field of expertise, Latinx Cultures.

"In addition, she is an outstanding mentor. A relevant example of the type of activities she organizes is the one-day conference where her students present original research. In preparation for this event, she trains them to presenting individual papers, invites a leading scholar as the keynote speaker, and designs activities to maximize time with the graduate students, including preparing a dinner at her home with her guest and the students to provide direct feedback and mentorship on their work. Truly, Dr. Anderson models the best a faculty member can give to her students. While her initiatives are welcomed and applauded in her small CMLL circle, her efforts should not go unnoticed at the university at large. Thus, I request you consider the many ways she makes the difference in the lives of Texas Tech students, and name her a “Hidden Gem” in our campus and community."

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Sarah Cantor

TTU faculty Sarah Cantor

Lecturer of Italian
CMLL

Nominated by Carmen Pereira-Muro:

"Dr. Sarah Cantor is a true hidden gem. She joined us in fall 2020 as lecturer for one of our small programs, Italian. She arrived in the midst of some of the worst of the pandemic. All her classes were online, and she had no real means of getting to know well any of her colleagues in other languages. In spite of COVID handicaps, she managed to utterly connect and cheer up her students, obtaining evaluations hovering at 5.0, with raving comments emphasizing what a great instructor she was, and what a cheerful community builder she was. In a year with no pictures of our students' events for our newsletter, Sarah managed to send us some super fun screen shots of her zoom classes with the students doing creative activities related to Italian culture. She has shown to be a true team player in the department, attending all lectures and departmental events, in person or online, and agreeing to improve the Italian curricula offered by teaching a class on Dante this summer. Sarah is a warm, joyful person and a committed and creative teacher, something both her students and her colleagues have so benefitted from in these hard past two years."

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Melissa Hays

TTU faculty Melissa Hays

Lecturer of American Sign Language
CMLL

Nominated by Carmen Pereira-Muro:

"Melissa Hays has been amazing me ever since she decided to rejoin the American Sign Language program and became its director. Under her leadership, the ASL program has bloomed, growing exponentially, at a much higher rate than the other language programs at CMLL. I give Melissa credit for this growth: she has a well-laid plan for the program, based on assessing community need, and during these years of pandemic and zoom encounters we have all seeing how necessary ASL interpreters are in an inclusive and fair society. Melissa has hired top instructors and supervises them closely. She has redesignRF the ASL curriculum, making it meaningful and career-oriented, far from just fulfilling the language requirement. Students majoring in ASL know that they will not only have a job, but greatly contribute to a fairer society. Besides being an inspired and energetic director who has brought her program to a new level, Melissa is a magnificent teacher. One has only to look at her numeric evaluations to realize how exceptional she is. For 2021, her numbers were solid 5's and a 4.9. The comments underscore what a phenomenal, caring, and effective instructor she is. She is very much a hidden (and silent) gem in our department and university!"

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John Hill

TTU faculty John Hill

Lecturer of American Sign Language
CMLL

Nominated by Melissa Hays:

"Johnny started at TTU not long before COVID began. His skill with technology has been helpful to the rest of the program. He continues to teach online and goes above and beyond to produce engaging and creative materials for students. As a deaf person, and someone who is so bright and energetic, he brings fresh perspective to our program."

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Belinda Kleinhans

TTU professor Belinda Kleinhans

Associate Professor of German and Associate Chair
CMLL

Nominated by Carmen Pereira-Muro:

"Dr. Kleinhans regularly teaches a large enrollment course—on their own time and meeting with her virtually once a week, when they exchange ideas about the readings and lectures. Holocaust, GERM 2312, and a graduate or undergraduate German class. Before the pandemic started, she was already one of the top teachers in CMLL. Even in her large enrollment class, typically taken by students not seeking the German degree, she had raving evaluations, with students commenting on how transformative that class had been. When the pandemic hit, Belinda did not want her teaching to lose any of its quality. She took an instructional module for online teaching, and learned overnight to create the most efficient synchronous and asynchronous approach to her teaching. She took the utmost care to make her Holocaust class a masterpiece of online design. The students would learn on their own time and meet with her virtually once a week to discuss the readings and lectures. It is not the numeric evaluations, the highest I have seen for an online, large enrollment class (4.8-5:00) what most impressed me about her teaching, but the students comments: "The best", "the most meaningful", "the most important class I have taken", "the best teacher I have ever encountered"... I could go on and on. Her German classes were nothing short of perfect, but I wanted to bring to your attention especially what she achieved with this class, which should be a centerpiece of TTU's teaching mission."

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Ashley Moreno-Góngora

Graduate Student and Senior TA
Chemistry & Biochemistry

Nominated by Dominick Casadonte:

"Ashley not only does research in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, she also is the senior TA for the freshman teaching lab and the President of the Chemistry Graduate Student Organization, a group that provides lab coats and goggles to upper-division labs as well as helps to fund trips to research conferences for graduate students. In her job as head or Senior TA, Ashley helped to put all of the AV together to film all of the labs for students to use during the pandemic. She also works with our prep lab chemist to coordinate all of the students who help prepare solutions for use in the freshman laboratories. Ashley is wonderfully efficient and effective, and certainly deserves to be recognized for her efforts in supporting student success!"

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Adrienne Pedrech

Instructor and General Chemistry Lab Coordinator
Chemistry & Biochemistry

Nominated by Dominick Casadonte:

"Dr. Pedrech coordinates chemistry undergraduate teaching labs for more than 2,000 students each semester. This is a very formidable task. On top of this, though, she teaches sections of general chemistry lecture. These duties have been particularly challenging during COVID, with some labs operating in hybrid fashion and others face-to-face. Dr. Pedrech is certainly an unsung hero in our department and a hidden gem."

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Brendan Regan

TTU professor Brendan Regan

Assistant Professor of Spanish
CMLL

Nominated by Belinda Kleinhans and James F. Lee:

"Brendan Regan is an outstanding teacher who has, since he started at TTU in 2017, gone above and beyond in helping students succeed and making the courses in his field of expertise, Spanish Linguistics, relevant so that students are equipped to respond to challenges of the world today. His focus on skill training and topics that are relevant for students in their lives after academia shows his deep dedication to their success outside of the classroom as well as within. Some ways in how he helps students succeed include the workshop-style teaching which he integrates across his courses. Each workshop-class has a well-defined focus, specific purpose, and both knowledge and skills outcomes. The workshop-class is an innovation to teaching Linguistics in the department and Dr. Regan introduced his colleagues to it, therefore broadening the positive impact his teaching has.

"Dr. Regan frames his teaching with certain principles. He: 1. connected previous knowledge with current learning; 2. informed students, repeatedly, of the goal of individual activities and their relationship to the ultimate goal of the lesson; 3. rewarded (praised) students' performance; 4. connected the lesson to the outside world (the research community); 5. built each activity on the previous one (step by step) until reaching the culminating activity that required the application of all previous activities; 6. demonstrated himself how to accomplish each activity prior to assigning the students to carry it out. Dr. Regan has completely embraced and promotes the idea that our students gain skills as well as knowledge; skills they can apply outside the specific context of the course they took. Life and work skills one puts in a resume. These are not simply a list put on a page of the syllabus. He has developed an activity for the last day of class during which students are given the knowledge and skills lists. They then have to reflect on their learning experience. Students cannot always articulate what they have learned; this activity helps them to do so.

"Dr. Regan has also spearheaded change in the Spanish and Applied Linguistics curriculum. He is leading the development of Spanish Linguistics courses at the undergraduate level. He developed and has repeatedly taught SPAN 3308 Introduction to Spanish Language Studies (Spanish Linguistics). In Fall 2019 he earned an amazing 4.8/5.0 on student evaluations for meeting course objectives, teacher effectiveness and providing a valuable learning experience. He has had two more courses approved that he will teach, SPAN 4318 Spanish in the U.S., and SPAN 3318 Sounds of Spanish. Given that TTU is a Hispanic Serving Institution, the absence of the former course was a hole in our curriculum; the latter is a course that empowers especially Spanish heritage speakers who might feel self-conscious about an accent they might have and introduces them to the linguistic variety of Spanish spoken across the U.S. that negates the idea of the one “correct” pronunciation and therefore empowers all speakers."

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Sydnor Roy

TTU professor Sydnor Roy

Assistant Professor of Classics
CMLL

Nominated by Erin Collopy:

"I am pleased to nominate Dr. Sydnor (Syd) Roy as a Hidden Gem. Dr. Roy has worked hard to ensure that students have the necessary support to succeed during the pandemic. In the classroom, she has 1) formalized alternative assignments for students who are not able to attend class so they see a realistic pathway to completing their work; 2) shifted assignments so there are fewer high-stake assessments; and 3) provided materials and instruction online for those students who have not been able to attend class. Outside of the classroom, Dr. Roy has created a single document listing all the support systems available on campus (counseling center, student health, the dean of students, food pantry) and in Lubbock (e.g. city health clinics) to give to students. She has increased her availability and offers various modes of communication. We all need a little more support these past few years and Dr. Roy has amply provided that for her students. I have served as Dr. Roy's peer evaluator and I know she is an excellent instructor, but the additional work she has put in to foster student success during a trying time is why I believe she is a Hidden Gem."

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Keith West

Undergraduate Teaching Lab Director and Physics Instructor
Physics & Astronomy

Nominated by Sung-Won Lee:

"Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the PHAS had no labs that could be offered in an online format. During the second half of the 2020 spring semester, when the campus was completely closed, Dr. West wrote several laboratory activities that used publicly available simulations. He emailed these to the students, TA's, and lecture instructors in our four introductory physics courses (PHYS-1403, PHYS-1404, PHYS-1408, and PHYS-2401). While students weren't able to complete all the labs on the schedule, these activities allowed them to investigate some of the topics they would have covered.

"For our summer courses in 2020 and 2021, Dr. West created YouTube channels for each of our introductory physics lab courses. While keeping the handful of simulations previously developed, he proceeded to make a series of videos for all the laboratory experiments we ran last summer. These consisted of him explaining the experimental setup and collecting the data. In some cases, he also interpreted some of the data. Students used these videos in conjunction with their lab manuals. They were still required to make predictions, answer questions, solve equations, calculate results, and do everything they would have done in lab except for collecting the data. These videos had to be ADA compliant, meaning they needed to have Closed Captions. YouTube will automatically add closed captioning, but the closed captioning YouTube adds isn't ADA compliant, as it doesn't have capitalization, punctuation, and often doesn't include the correct wording. Dr. West had to manually edit all the closed captioning in order for the videos to be ADA compliant. What is worth mentioning here is that Dr. West worked almost every day in two summers to make a full sets of video for introductory physics courses. As the department chair, I am very grateful for his initiative and dedication.

"In summary, Dr. West fulfills a vital role in our department in his capacity of teaching lab director. He is not content to maintain the status quo and seeks ways to improve the development and teaching methods of new curriculums in introductory physics courses; particularly, physics lab courses. His loyalty and dedication to the department are unmatched. The school has a large number of staff, but we are very lucky to have Dr. West, who has been performing all the introductory physics education tasks outstandingly over many years (~10 years!). He is not only an asset to the department, but also to the College of Arts & Sciences and the Texas Tech University (because he educates ~2,000 young minds so well every semester!). He is highly deserving of this recognition."

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Carol Williams

TTU faculty Carol Williams

Lecturer
Mathematics & Statistics

Nominated by Brock Williams:

"Carol is our course coordinator for Math 1330 and Math 1331, two of our largest enrollment undergraduate classes. When the pandemic struck, she developed complete online courses with video lectures, PowerPoint presentations, matching online homework, etc. Since then, she has continued to provide the GPTI's teaching 1330 and 1331 with materials and mentoring. This spring she is piloting the use of Learning Assistants in her 1331 section."

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Hong Zhang

TTU professor Hong Zhang

Professor of Plant Molecular Biology and Plant Biotechnology
Biological Sciences

Nominated by Souvik Roy:

D. Zhang has been teaching Genetics for the last 30 years at Texas Tech. He always goes extra miles for his students to learn and make them understand about the subject. He is passionate about the subject and loves to teach Genetics as well. Providing extra office hours and/or concept clearing sessions etc., reflects his caring nature to his students. His devotion to Texas Tech is not only limited to Genetics class but also he spends 8 to 11 PM working daily (24x7); this proves his dedication to work. As a TA and Ph.D. student under him, I feel really proud of being his student. He inspires me every day. This all satisfies the criteria of being a 'Hidden Gem,' and he is a precious gem of Texas Tech indeed. I appreciate the efforts made/making by Dr. Zhang for the students for the past 30 years. Thank you."

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Follow this link to view all 2022 Hidden Gems across campus.