First Day of Class

What Is Your Why? A First-Day In-Class Activity

Like many people, I have days when the simple act of getting out of bed feels daunting, let alone going to campus, lecturing, meeting with students, attending faculty meetings, grading papers, and so on. These challenging days are often amplified by an internal dialogue

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Cognitive Goals for Class: Academic Mindset

Psychologists and educators have studied learning for well over 100 years, and we still don’t know the specific conditions that result in learning. If we did, then teaching would be easy. A teacher would simply recreate the specific conditions, and students would always learn. We

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Bird of Paradise flower, illustrating intrigue

On the First Day of Class, Begin with Intrigue

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I was just beginning my teaching career, I had one clear goal on the first day of class: scare the living crap out of my students.

I’m exaggerating, but only a little. And while I’m tempted to say, “I’m

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Falling in Love: An Icebreaker

Even after almost 25 years of teaching, one task I still approach with new-teacher determination is finding an effective icebreaker to kick off a semester. Every summer, I scour the internet with the goal of finding a non-cliched, community-building, invigorating activity that I can wow

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Flip the First Day

It’s almost impossible to read blogs, articles, even books on teaching without seeing a multitude of suggestions for not “wasting” the first day of class by covering the syllabus, course schedule, class rules and routines, and the like. I’ve even written one myself (Brown, 2009).

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making connections in teaching

Making Connections in Teaching

As teaching professors, we know first-hand how complex an endeavor teaching is. The sheer number of instructional interactions, decisions, and processes can be overwhelming to enact, much less to master. To streamline such complexity, I have adopted what I consider a beneficial perspective. In its

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