Texas A&M chemist Dr. Joanna Goodey-Pellois is one of six university faculty members who have been appointed to 2024 University Professorships in Undergraduate Teaching Excellence (UPUTE) at Texas A&M University.
The prestigious UPUTE awards are reserved for the university’s most distinguished teachers of undergraduates — faculty who have exhibited uncommon excellence and devotion to the education of undergraduate students at Texas A&M. The three-year appointments carry an annual stipend and discretionary bursary to support each recipient's teaching program and related professional development. The professorships are made possible through generous endowments by George and Irma Eppright, John Kincaid, and Arthur J. and Wilhelmina Doré Thaman.
Goodey-Pellois, an instructional professor in the Department of Chemistry, and her fellow 2024-2027 UPUTE honorees will be formally recognized during an April 26 Faculty Affairs Spring Awards Ceremony, set for 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Student Recreation Center, Room 2229. She joins Dr. Darren Hartl, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering within the College of Engineering; Dr. Andy Herring, John K. Riggs '41 Beef Cattle Professor in the Department of Animal Science within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Dr. Sandra Scamardo Lampo, a clinical professor in the Department of Marketing in Mays Business School; Dr. Alison Pittman, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Nusring; and Dr. Robin Rackley, a clinical professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture within the School of Education and Human Development, in receiving the coveted accolade.
Joanna is imminently deserving of this award. She expertly teaches thousands of students, maintaining rigor while exhibiting concern for student well-being. In addition, she facilitates excellent teaching in others, both graduate student teaching assistants and faculty, across the Texas A&M campus.
Goodey-Pellois joined the Texas A&M Chemistry faculty in 2006 and has served as director of the First Year Program (FYP) in Chemistry since 2019. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Houston in 2001 and completed a one-year postdoctoral research assistantship there prior to beginning her independent academic career as a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Barnard College from 2002 to 2006.
At Texas A&M, Goodey-Pellois has taught general chemistry to more than 10,000 freshmen scientists and engineers, designed professional development and training exercises for hundreds of chemistry graduate students and taught a communications seminar for an additional hundreds of senior undergraduate chemistry majors. Her focus on helping students build solid foundations can be seen through her career leadership positions thus far, first as a general chemistry laboratory coordinator (2007-2008), then as an associate graduate advisor (2010-2018) and currently as FYP director. In the latter role, she oversees the education of thousands of students per semester in first-year general chemistry lectures and laboratories, both by direct instruction and by coordination of the overall FYP curriculum and teaching. Goodey-Pellois also actively engages with the broader educational community across the Texas A&M campus and is passionate about sharing her insights at local and national teaching and learning workshops.
“Joanna is imminently deserving of this award,” said Dr. Simon W. North, John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry and head of Texas A&M Chemistry. “She expertly teaches thousands of students, maintaining rigor while exhibiting concern for student well-being. Students recognize her teaching talent and vote with their feet: Her sections of CHEM 107 are the first to fill during preregistration. In addition, she facilitates excellent teaching in others, both graduate student teaching assistants and faculty, across the Texas A&M campus.”
Goodey-Pellois’ previous recognitions include a 2023 Provost Academic Professional Track (APT) Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Awards for Teaching at both the university (2021) and college levels (2020), a 2019 Texas A&M Honoring Excellence Award and being named a 2019 Texas A&M 21st Century Classroom Building Fellow.
In the course of her nearly two-decade career at Texas A&M, Goodey-Pellois has succeeded in making her chemistry lectures accessible for first-semester students with different backgrounds. She intentionally incorporates “How to Succeed in College” material into her introductory chemistry courses, adding lessons each year as she discovers where students stumble, not only inside the classroom but outside of it. Colleagues and students alike note that she makes sure her students stay engaged by integrating frequent polling questions into her lectures. During each polling question, she navigates her way around large auditorium classroom settings to make sure she is accessible to all of her students. She excels in teaching in all formats, including interactive hybrid courses requiring her to simultaneously teach 100 face-to-face students along with 500 remote students. To ensure that her remote students received adequate feedback and resources, Goodey-Pellois developed online video resources, incorporated additional low-stakes quizzes in between higher-stakes exams, and hired teaching assistants to answer online questions in real-time during class.
Goodey-Pellois’ commitment to improving teaching practices and student outcomes extends well beyond the chemistry classroom, garnering results that benefit both students and faculty. In recent years, her passion for designing not only active learning courses but also the spaces in which they are offered led her to take an active role in the design and usage planning for Texas A&M’s Innovative Learning Classroom Building that opened in 2020. As a Faculty Fellow for the facility, she assisted other faculty in creating and implementing learning experiences for these innovative learning spaces.
In addition, Goodey-Pellois co-developed the Inclusive Teaching Faculty Fellows (ITFF) Learning Community with STEM faculty at Texas A&M. The ITFF program commenced in January 2021 with 17 faculty fellows. The estimated impact of the program is around 3,000 lower-level STEM students who were taught by the ITFF cohort in the Fall 2021 semester. In 2023, Goodey-Pellois collaborated with the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Center for Teaching Excellence to design sessions for the New Faculty Academy. She presented talks to new faculty about teaching students how to learn and using Canvas as a scaffold for onboarding students into a course. In May 2023, she helped to facilitate the inaugural Mobile Summer Institute for STEM faculty at Texas A&M that is based on the National Institute on Scientific Teaching's renowned Summer Institute on Scientific Teaching. In addition, she recently presented to the Center for Teaching Excellence Faculty and Student Advisory Board on defining student success in large service course programs.
Beyond her teaching and administrative roles, Goodey-Pellois actively engages in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Since 2021, she has been part of an interdisciplinary $600,000 National Science Foundation-Improving Undergraduate STEM Education-funded project working to assess the socioscientific decision-making processes of freshmen STEM majors aimed at equipping STEM educators with teaching strategies in the era of misinformation. In September, she and her colleagues presented a virtual webinar, Using Novel Instructional Materials to Improve Students’ mis/disinformation Detection and Socioscientific Decision-making, reaching approximately 100 science educators nationwide. In-person workshops based on the online seminar are being presented at the 2024 National Association for Research in Science Teaching International Conference and the 2024 Association of Science Teacher Education International Conference.
Learn more about Goodey-Pellois and her teaching, research and service efforts.
For additional information on University Professorships for Undergraduate Teaching, go to the Office of Faculty Affairs website.