How well a class functions is the result of both what the teacher does and what the students do. The way we solicit course evaluation feedback reinforces students’ tendency to see the teacher as the one who’s responsible for whether it was a good class.
“The New Cheating Economy,” an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2016), tells the story of two Western Carolina University professors who set up a fake online class to see what forms of cheating they could detect. Their story shows that cheating is
Positive classroom climate can encourage students to participate, think deeply about content, and engage peers in intellectual debate. Creating a classroom climate conducive to that type of expression can be difficult. Classrooms are filled with a diverse cross-section of our society representing multiple learning preferences
When students ask us, as they occasionally do, “I wasn’t in class yesterday. Did I miss anything important?” most of us feel at least a bit of disrespect and some aggravation. If we take the question at face value, it implies that the student thinks
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” This quote, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is often used in gifted education to justify the attention, resources, and opportunities provided to those who are more academically talented than others. It’s intended to connote
Last summer, I reached the point of eligibility for early retirement. I thought about taking the leap but did not. I decided to keep teaching, asking myself, how hard could it be to teach for another few years? Harder than I imagined, as it turned
“Prevalent among university faculty is the perception that a large number of today’s students possess an outsized sense of entitlement” (Luckett, Trocchia, Noel, & Marlin, 2017, p. 96). But what exactly does entitlement mean in the academic realm? High grades without much in the way
“Language influences thought and action. The words we use to describe things—to ourselves and others—affect how we and they think and act.” (Weimer, 2015).
Learners can be empowered or suppressed by the language(s) used in our classrooms and other learning spaces. Given the increasingly divisive rhetoric
The line between collaboration and cheating is fuzzy. It’s still clear at the edges, but messy in the middle. When students are working in groups, searching for a solution to a problem, looking through possible answers for the best one, or sorting out material to
Did you know that the average attention span in the year 2000 was 12 seconds? And 12 years later, in the year 2012, the average attention span had gone down to eight seconds. So by my calculations, in the year 2036, the attention span will
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