Part of the Discovery Initiative’s long-term vision is the refashioning of undergraduate education at Berkeley. That refashioning often takes the form of evaluating and documenting innovations in classroom experience.
This archive collects documentation of the curricular innovation Discovery has supported over the course of the last several years, as well as distilled accounts of “Best Practices” for implementing Discovery into the classroom experience.
Discovery Pilot Courses
Discovery is proud to support the refresh and reinvention of six courses across campus in spring 2025. These courses are models for the future of undergraduate education at Berkeley. These classes demonstrate the transformative potential of scaling intensive research experiences directly into the curriculum and undergraduate major requirements in particular.
Trailblazers, Reporting Back!
Launched in 2020 through a generous gift from the Chernin family, the Berkeley Discovery Departmental Innovation Award Program provided funding and guidance to departments for a multi-year process of refining their vision and implementation plan for Discovery at scale. This ambitious effort to give faculty the space to innovate their department’s curricular and co-curricular offerings selected a cohort of six teams - coined “Discovery Trailblazers - in May 2021. Teams received multi-year awards and contributed to a learning community to share best practices and replicable models for Discovery across campus. These practices include everything from ensuring a scaffolded learning experience for students, allowing them to build their skills across multi-year course offerings, to methods for reshaping pre-existing required courses to infuse them with more hands-on learning experiences.
Read more on our Impact page and check out the videos below to see how our Trailblazers got to work innovating new pedagogical environments for Discovery learning.
Teaching Innovation Showcase
A brand new repository is available for inspiration and practical, actionable resources for instructors seeking to imbue their courses with high-impact Discovery learning. This showcase includes best practices from our Discovery Trailblazers and was developed in collaboration with the Center for Teaching in Learning. Below are some of the highlights from this repository!
- Foundations of Discovery Learning for College of Chemistry Transfer Students
- “Powerpoint Party” community builder with the Youth Equity Discovery Initiative
- Experiential Field Learning in Language Courses
- Enhancing vocabulary learning through movement and interaction in introductory Italian courses
- Framing AI images in introductory Reading & Composition courses
- Developing student leadership through BioDiscovery, Community and Culture
- Introducing students to faculty and their grand challenges
- Physics in practice: Solving real world problems
- Research as a tool for change
Teaching Towards Discovery Symposium
In February 2024, Berkeley Discovery and the Center for Teaching + Learning co-hosted a symposium bringing together faculty, students, staff and community partners who work on creative and high impact learning experiences for undergraduate students (i.e. Discovery). Under the theme of “Teaching Towards Discovery: Student as Creator” the symposium focused on redefining educational experiences by emphasizing the role of students as active participants and co-creators in their Discovery learning journey.
Student documentation assistants, Miranda Zhang and AIlsa Sun, were hired to create a dynamic report of the symposium that can be utilized to advocate for high impact learning practices.
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Read the written report with an in-depth analysis on the impact of Discovery-based learning, case study examples and clear actions for stakeholders to take.
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View and share the multimedia summary of the report for a quick summary and artistic capture of the symposium content.
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Join the UC Berkeley High Impact Learning Community to continue the conversation.
