Motivating Students

Maximizing Student Engagement with Course Readings

Have you ever struggled to get students to do required readings? Do your students treat them as optional? Perhaps they do the readings, but when you ask them to engage in critical discussion or think deeply about the material, they are unable to do so.

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Over-the-shoulder view of a female professor lecturing to an auditorium

Teaching the How: Three Ways to Support Failure

I give students in my literature courses a lot of weird assignments: I have them make and post films about why people should read Dickens. I tell them these films should show careful analysis of the text but should also entertain and have good music

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midterm conference with student

Mid-term Conferences: A Mutually Beneficial Assessment Tool

I decided last spring to implement a new teaching strategy: individual midterm conferences with every student enrolled in my classes. That’s approximately 75 students total. Throughout my years of teaching, I’d heard colleagues report that meeting with students individually during the semester had a positive

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fixed mindset - college classroom

Challenging (and Changing) Fixed Mindsets in the Classroom

Fresh from winter break, my students want to test my boundaries—and they should. But even as they challenge me, many of my students will also limit themselves by defining their intelligence and talents as fixed traits. Each semester I hear the familiar refrains: “I’m not

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student motivation

Five Keys to Motivating Students

Recently I had reason to revisit Paul Pintrich’s meta-analysis on motivation. It’s still the piece I most often see referenced when it comes to what’s known about student motivation. Subsequent research continues to confirm the generalizations reported in it. Like most articles that synthesize the

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Helping our Students

Helping our Students: Too Much? Or, Not Enough?

As teaching professors, we try to change students, whether it’s a change that increases their factual knowledge, one that gives them a new way of thinking, or one that develops an important new skill. Frustration, stress, and tension frequently accompany change, especially change that involves

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studying outside

Using Reading Prompts to Encourage Critical Thinking

“Students can critically read in a variety of ways:

  • When they raise vital questions and problems from the text,
  • When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information,
  • When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience
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reflections about connections in learning

Reflections about Connections

Emily Gravett writes insightfully about the disconnect between instructor and student course goals. She’s writing about religion courses and how academic goals, such as “analyzing the historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, political and social contexts of religious beliefs and practices” are not the goals that motivate

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