When students have completed what they think is the final draft of an essay, I find it useful to do the following editing activity. I don’t tell students what we are about to do. I want them to discover the process of omitting needless words.
Assignments are a terribly important part of the teaching and learning equation. They aren’t just random activities that faculty ask students to complete for points and grades; they are the vehicles through which students learn course content. By studying for exams and engaging with content
Herreid and colleagues have asked themselves the question raised in the title. To answer, they surveyed the more than 1,300 teachers on the Center’s listserv (mostly biologists and faculty who teach health-related subjects), asking them to identify their favorite case and say what made it
A recent and excellent article that proposes a model for “building teams that learn” recommends that teachers have students develop a team charter early in their interaction. “Completing a team charter encourages team members to set goals and discuss how they will work together; it
There continues to be interest in the kind of feedback that helps students make changes that improve their work. Take something called feed-forward, for example. It’s defined as “timely and constructive feedback that feeds into the next assignment.” (p. 451) Here’s a study that assessed
Kant declared false the commonplace saying “That may be true in theory, but it won’t work in practice.” He acknowledged that there might be difficulties in application, but he said that if a proposition is true in theory, it must work in practice. What about
On the first day of classes two years ago, I had students in my professional and technical writing course send me an email with their goals for the semester. I discovered they had no understanding of goals, expectations, or objectives. I realized there are reasons why
Can you teach students to be creative? Most of us would say no. It’s more like trying to teach for it—encouraging it, promoting it, acknowledging when it happens, and rewarding it. Despite the difficulties associated with teaching creativity, teachers shouldn’t be excused from trying to
Often the articles highlighted in The Teaching Professor are examples of pedagogical scholarship that could beneficially be done in many fields. That is the case with this piece on developing writing assignments, but it also contains content useful to any faculty member who uses writing
The benefits of concept maps are well established. They encourage students to organize knowledge and do so in ways meaningful to them. They help students sort out, prioritize, and understand relationships between terms, concepts, and ideas. Students can also use concept maps to forge relationships
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