As a tenured full professor, I’m mostly scheduled for upper division and graduate courses. However, last year I taught two classes of traditional aged, first-year students. It was a good learning experience and provided me with new insights about beginning college students.
It’s a 400-level Development of Sociological Theory course for majors and instructor Julie Pelton aspires not only to teach the content but to introduce students to either different styles of learning or self-regulatory and metacognitive strategies. She writes that most of the students have some
If students are struggling to understand the assigned reading, teachers can opt for something easier to comprehend or they might consider this strategy developed and used by theology professor Ruth Anne Reese. She purposefully assigns students reading materials written at a level most of her
Being flexible is one of those ongoing challenges for teachers. There’s the desire to be responsive to student needs—life does happen—but then students have been known to take advantage of teachers and granting the request of one student opens the door and makes it difficult
Here’s a sampling of details from a recent survey that asked students and faculty a variety of questions about their use of cell phones (including smart phones), their perceptions of the effects of doing so and their estimation of the effectiveness of faculty phone policies.
Many faculty consider the syllabus a contract for learning that they set up for students. However, there continues to be suggestions in the literature and among pedagogical experts that this is a troublesome perspective. The language used in syllabi modeled like contracts sets a tone
Traditional academic papers often undermine motivation by failing to show students the real-life applications of their subject. But with a little thought, you can craft assignments that add pizzazz across multiple areas of study. These activities provide students with opportunities to think more critically, analyze
As faculty, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of “The Expert’s Blind Spot.” This is the well-established tendency of experts to not be able to understand the troubles of novices because the expert either never encountered the problem or has long
Gamification of learning has become a hot topic in education as of late. But instructors are understandably puzzled about how to gamify their courses. Should they just add a Jeopardy PowerPoint to one of their modules, or do something else?
Online faculty are always on the lookout for a good system for facilitating group work. You want a system that separates student contributions and allows the instructor to view the progression of student work. Google Drive, a cloud-based, shared document editing website, is ideal for
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