Time constraints—that’s what faculty consistently report as the reason they don’t implement changes in their teaching. It’s the barrier identified by almost 67 percent of 3,000 geosciences faculty (Riihimaki & Viskupic, 2020) and what 8 percent of faculty in a collection of departments at a
Failure is a regular column topic—specifically, the need for students and their teachers to reorient to it as an opportunity for learning. Our natural inclination makes us want to run from it. We don’t need to intentionally fail; plenty of it happens without intention, and
It always takes me longer than I plan when I do anything with my books. I look for one book and see another I haven’t looked at for a while. I look for something in a book and find something else of interest. Case in
Transitions are liminal spaces. We move through them from one place to another. In writing, transitions build bridges between paragraphs. They give readers a sense of where they’re headed. But in some transitions that space in between feels less like a bridge and more like
Students prize course content they deem relevant to their professional aspirations. If they determine it’s not relevant (and they make that decision about lots of course content), students slog their way through the course, not bothering to learn the material in ways that promote its
Are we as objective as we should be about the new teaching techniques we try? The argument that we aren’t, usually put to us by researchers, goes something like this: We read, hear about, or otherwise discover a new technique. It could be a strategy
It happens regularly in educational research: two studies look at the same intervention and report findings that disagree. That frustrates teachers looking for a clear answer about a technique’s effectiveness. But are the findings all that matter in these empirical explorations of instructional strategies?
My mentor, Christopher Knapper, recently turned 80, a milestone worthy of celebration and reflection. Here’s what I’ve learn about mentorship from one of the best.
Can we talk about the perils of media multitasking enough? I don’t think so, and that belief was confirmed by a clearly organized and well-written review of the research on multitasking with various electronic devices (May & Elder, 2018). I try to be measured in
I’ve been doing some reading on failure. Yes, I know, depressing subject, but it’s our need to avoid failure that makes it such a distasteful topic. We—and the reference here is to teachers and students—need to orient ourselves to the learning potential failure offers.
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