Early in my teaching career, I attended a professional development event. The only session I remember was one given by Alan Lakein. It featured his book How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. He proposed an elaborate scheme for making and prioritizing
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) isn’t just for students with disabilities, it can help all students be better learners.
The increased (and increasing) diversity of students at colleges and universities means learning needs to be flexible enough to accommodate that diversity. A one-size-fits-all approach to
Faculty have access to more information about college teaching than ever before. Researchers have studied a host of instructional approaches and published results in myriad journals. Educators have shared summaries of and links to such studies informally on websites and through Twitter feeds. This is
By the time the end of the course rolls around, it’s hard to think creatively about what to do on the last day. Depending on the course, the last day may be accompanied with feelings of joy, sadness, relief, or all three.
What is it? The amount of work it takes to do well in a course? The amount of time it takes to complete the work assigned in a course? The amount of time students actually spend studying and completing assignments? It’s a term that’s often
Many students don’t do the reading before class. Most surveys report that less than 50 percent of students have read the assigned material before it’s dealt with in class or online. Most faculty don’t need to be persuaded of this fact. They regularly deal with
How do students think about assignments? A lot never get past the idea that they’re basically unpleasant things faculty make them do. What does interest a lot of students is finding out what the teacher wants in the assignment, not so much what the assignments
When creating course materials, it is important to be as inclusive as possible. A common way of working to ensure that materials respond to different approaches to learning is to use Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which proposes inclusive course design. It is a framework
It’s a favorite assignment in upper-division major courses—have students collaborate on a research project. The rationale is straightforward. Students learn how to do research by doing it. Of course it depends, but in most fields, students new to research find it a daunting process that
I continue to be concerned that we don’t design learning experiences as developmentally as we should. What happens to students across a course (and the collection of courses that make up a degree program) ought to advance their knowledge and skills. Generally, we do a
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