Teaching Strategies and Techniques

class participation

Class Participation: What Behaviors Count?

What counts for participation isn’t always addressed when we talk with students about the importance of participation. It’s easy to assume that everybody knows what’s involved—but is that a safe assumption?

When considering what qualifies as participation, some behaviors come to mind quickly—asking questions, answering

Read More »
students working on group assignment

My Students Don’t Like Group Work

Students don’t always like working in groups. Ann Taylor, an associate professor of chemistry at Wabash College, had a class that was particularly vocal in their opposition. She asked for their top 10 reasons why students don’t want to work in groups and they offered

Read More »
student engagement

Classroom Discussions: How to Apply the Right Amount of Structure

While preparing for a Teaching Professor Conference session on facilitating classroom discussions (much of which applies to online exchanges), I’ve been reminded yet again of the complexity involved in leading a discussion with students new to the content and unfamiliar with academic discourse. hile preparing

Read More »
Classroom Discussion

Improvising Great Classroom Discussion

I was watching a video of several of my students teaching this week. I had to be away for a conference, and they were scheduled to teach that day anyway, so I asked our Center for Teaching Excellence to record it. I would evaluate them

Read More »

Using Feed-Based Social Media

Social media fundamentally transformed the web by making everyone a content producer. But this move from web 1.0 to 2.0 also exploded the number of websites that people wanted to monitor. Now we want to see what is going on with our hundreds of Facebook

Read More »
time to evaluate

A Solution to the Free Rider Problem in Group Activities

Group activities are an excellent way to improve student learning in an online course. But they invariably raise the free-rider problem—the student who does not contribute his or her fair share of the effort. This is particularly bothersome to students when there is one group

Read More »
Archives

Get the Latest Updates

Subscribe To Our Weekly Newsletter

Magna Digital Library
wpChatIcon