If you asked students to tell you what makes a course hard, what would they say? Would their answers be the same as yours? Would it be a problem if they weren’t?
“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
We’ve all experienced failed learning activities, such as painful class sessions, online disasters, or group projects gone wrong.
When we analyze what went wrong, we usually wring our hands and lament the state of college students today, but is it possible that we ourselves
My wiper blades needed to be replaced. I hate these kinds of tasks; they make me feel completely inadequate. But I was doing a lot of reading about learning, and I was looking for concrete examples in my own life to help me better understand
You’ve decided you need to update, redesign, refresh your course. Maybe for your own reasons, such poor student performance. Or perhaps you want to try a new technique or a tool. Or maybe your reasons are external, such as a change in the curriculum or
The shift toward student-centered learning has transformed our classrooms, and it’s no longer enough to be a subject-matter expert. Instructors have to not only know the material their students need to learn, but they also have to have a reasonably good grasp of how students
If you are a professor of a certain age, you may have had the experience that I had in my first semester of teaching. I asked, “Who’s seen Norma Rae?” (I wanted to use it to illustrate that working in a mill causes hearing loss.)
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, it should be given that much of your time,” says Edward Tufte. Biology professor Amy Wiles says it was what got her started thinking about the importance of visual representations in her field: “Students needs to be
Making college coursework interesting and relevant is a challenge. Recently, I considered using some sort of gaming strategy to motivate my students, but as I thought about what I really wanted them to gain from my class, it became clear that I needed to do
College textbooks are expensive, and prices continue to rise. The Bureau of Labor reported a 600 percent increase in textbook costs between 1980 and 2012. The average 2015 American college student graduated with over $35,000 of student debt, a portion of which came from textbook
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