When Scotty Dunlap, assistant professor of safety, security, and emergency management at Eastern Kentucky University, surveyed his students about group work at the outset of an online graduate-level course on auditing, they unanimously gave it low ratings. Asked the same question at the end of
Many teachers experience “the decline in reading” as the weeks of a semester progress.To remedy the decline in reading and resulting silence, I conduct “guided tours” of assigned readings.
Every October, members of the Canadian Forces College’s National Security Program—a master of public administration program for senior military personnel and senior public service professionals—have the opportunity (and privilege) to travel to Ottawa to meet with high-level policy practitioners. The intent of the trip is
A few years ago, I felt that if students could wean themselves from relying on me to orchestrate class discussions, the activity would become richer and many of these problems would be solved. With this in mind, I decided to try “leading” a discussion without
A line of research (done mostly in Australia and Great Britain) has been exploring what prompts students to opt for deep or surface approaches to learning. So far this research has established strong links between the approaches taken to teaching and those taken to learning.
No, the objective isn’t to make assignments optional. But the article referenced below raises the possibility of giving students some choice over the kinds of assignments they complete. In previous issues of the newsletter, we have shared systems that give students some discretion in the
In my course, the required reading is intensive and extensive. Students must read multiple texts that range across disciplines, genres, history, and culture. The goal of this interdisciplinary course is improvement of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. My students, like many others, live complicated
Required introductory courses—that’s how most students meet our disciplines or, as John Zipp says (he’s writing specifically about sociology), they are the “public face” of the field. Triangulating data from several sources, Zipp raises a number of questions about these first and, for most students,
In May I finished a second edition of my Learner-Centered Teaching book. Revising it gave me the chance to revisit my thinking about the topic and look at work done since publication of the first edition ten years ago. It is a subject
“Why should we change the way we teach?” a marketing professor asked with an honest gaze and a smile that bespoke sincerity. It was early in a workshop session just after I’d introduced the idea of learner-centered teaching and explained why students should be doing
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