On April 4, University Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success Saundra McGuire, a retired assistant vice chancellor and chemistry professor, will be honored with the 2017 American Chemical Society Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences. The ceremony will take place in San Francisco, California, as a part of the 253rd ACS National Meeting.
The American Chemical Society is a national organization that promotes inquiry into the field of chemistry.
“My activities started long before my work with the Center for Academic Success, even before I came to LSU,” McGuire said. “A big part of it was helping students understand that they could be successful in chemistry.”
McGuire’s career began over 45 years ago when she studied chemistry at Southern University and A&M College. But her experience influencing students began during her graduate studies at Cornell University where McGuire acted as a graduate teaching assistant during her first year for the introductory level chemistry course.
When she was a TA, there were parts of lectures at Cornell that included information McGuire felt students needed to know. But she said it was assumed the students may already have known some of the information.
“I started meeting with students to help them fill in those gaps,” McGuire said. “I knew that they wouldn’t understand the information if they didn’t understand what was, I call, ‘between the lines,’ but I knew that they wouldn’t know that information was there to be learned unless somebody helped them understand it.”
McGuire is the author of “Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation.” The book provides teachers with the resources needed to apply concepts that McGuire has used to improve students’ learning experiences.
As the Center for Academic Success’ Director Emerita, McGuire still has an office in Choppin Hall where she sees students every few weeks. The majority of her time is spent travelling to other universities and conferences to help faculty understand how to teach students how to learn.
Since joining the University in 1999, McGuire has given workshops on faculty development at more than 250 universities in more than 40 states and in eight different countries. McGuire said her methodology has continuously developed over the past 40 years as she observed students’
counter-productive learning habits.
Throughout her career, McGuire has earned the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award from Cornell, the 2002 Dr. Henry C. McBay Outstanding Chemical Educator Award and the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. In January, McGuire received the Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“I’m going to be accepting the award on behalf of my colleagues, for example, at the Center for Academic Success, who played a very big role in developing these strategies [and] also my colleagues here in chemistry at LSU and also the mentors that I have had who encouraged me at Southern University…and certainly the students who were receptive to the advice and discussions and went on to be successful,” McGuire said.