Brian Gute was recognized with the 2025-26 Jean G. Blehart Award for Distinguished Teaching. This campus-wide honor recognizes extraordinary contributions to UMD's teaching mission. Unlike standard teaching accolades, the Blehart Award specifically honors faculty whose educational leadership and innovation create a "ripple effect" that improves the educational system well beyond their own classrooms.
Pedagogical Innovation
Since starting at UMD in 2008, Gute has built a reputation as a prominent change agent within the Swenson College of Science and Engineering (SCSE). He intentionally designs his courses around evidence-based pedagogies to maximize student success:
- Flipped Classrooms: Replacing traditional lectures with pre-class videos to maximize time spent on in-class, small-group problem-solving.
- Specifications-Based Grading: Utilizing a mastery-focused framework where students demonstrate deep conceptual understanding over multiple attempts rather than accumulating points.
- Gamification: Embedding elements like "leveling up" and experience points to boost student motivation.
- CUREs (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences): Engaging lab students in authentic research to solve real-world problems.
Campus-Wide Impact
Fulfilling the core "Educational Leadership" criteria of the Blehart Award, Gute’s strategies have left a systemic mark on UMD. His flipped General Chemistry II course served as a successful pilot that transformed departmental instruction; today, nearly every General Chemistry section incorporates some of his active-learning structures.
Beyond his department, Gute has uplifted instructional quality campus-wide by serving as a Faculty Fellow in STEM Education and as Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. In these roles, he led university-level workshops and discussions to support colleagues across all disciplines. He also actively contributes to the broader scholarship of teaching, publishing peer-reviewed reports on his methodologies in Chemistry Education Research.
Transformational Mentorship
Despite introducing rigorous and novel instructional methods, Gute consistently maintains exceptional student evaluations. Students routinely praise his approachable classroom culture, which fosters meaningful student-instructor interactions. His courses help students overcome subject-matter apprehensions and reshape how they view themselves as scientists—a transformational impact that alumni continue to praise years down the road.