Sally Wu, PhD

Bio

Sally PW Wu, PhD, (she/they/ta) joined the Center for Teaching and Learning in June 2021. As the Assistant Director for Educational Technology, she provides training, consultations, and pedagogic support on the effective and innovative uses of educational technologies. She develops workshops and resources on how to use university-supported tools to implement evidence-based teaching strategies in and out of different classroom spaces. She also partners with faculty and students to spotlight their experiences with teaching and learning at Washington University. In consultations, Sally works closely with instructors of all levels to integrate technologies and pedagogical scaffolds that enhance student learning and engagement in their classes. She researches emerging technology trends, particularly for tools and practices that foster critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, collective action, and cultural humility. Sally also evaluates the affordances and challenges for educational technologies across departments and schools at Washington University, including digital technologies and classroom technologies. She uses these data to advise institutional units on the pedagogical uses of educational technologies across campus.

Sally has extensive experience collaborating with instructors and institutional partners to design and implement educational technologies in higher education. She has investigated the effects of various student-centered strategies that enhance learning with technologies in mixed-methods laboratory studies and classroom studies with hundreds of students. Overall, the interventions have shown improved learning outcomes for students and contributed to research on how to leverage educational technologies to increase engagement and equity in undergraduate classrooms. Sally has also worked with faculty, administrators, staff, and other key stakeholders via departmental or university-level programs to advise on various campus initiatives.

Over the past decade, Sally has taught students in small seminars, large lectures, workshops, asynchronous online courses, and other contexts using learning management tools, video conferencing tools, and other learning technologies. She asks students to discuss ideas on collaborative Google docs, complete reflective surveys/polls, share images/videos on Padlet, or respond to a given question with fingers/dance moves/emojis. Although the technologies and pedagogical strategies change based on the context and course goals of each course, integrating interactive, learner-centered activities is a cornerstone of her teaching.

Sally earned her PhD in Educational Psychology-Learning Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation research focused on enhancing the use of educational technologies in active learning classrooms, particularly to learn complex visual-spatial representations of content in STEM courses. Her interventions helped students develop disciplinary skills used by professionals and were designed to integrate seamlessly into the pedagogy and curriculum of existing courses.