Getting students to do their assigned reading is a struggle. Most teachers don’t need anyone to tell them what the research pretty consistently reports. On any given day, only 20 to 30 percent of the students arrive at class having done the reading. Faculty are
A recent and excellent article that proposes a model for “building teams that learn” recommends that teachers have students develop a team charter early in their interaction. “Completing a team charter encourages team members to set goals and discuss how they will work together; it
For the past couple of years I have been using some technologies that require setup before the class starts and have found that the setup interferes with my ability to converse with students before and after class.
For the past several semesters I’ve have had students in my border community college classes who are part of our grant-funded migrant student program, known as CAMP. These students are usually first-generation college students. Their parents work in the fields from dawn until dusk, and
Unfortunately, all too often performance on the first exam predicts performance throughout the course, especially for those students who do poorly on the first test. Faculty and institutions provide an array of supports for these students, including review sessions, time with tutors, more practice problems,
For many of us, learning to teach in a different way is a long and not always easy journey. Old habits die hard. Moreover, most of us are not particularly well-prepared to confront the task. We have copious amounts of content knowledge but lack great
When I introduced a new topic in class, I would often refer back to something said or discussed during a previous class period or to a reading assigned for homework. I would attempt to make connections for students so that they could link the new
Much research documents that motivation is a major factor in student success. However, although students often know what they should do (attend class, do extra credit, and get help), many of them don’t. Thaler and Sunstein’s popular book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and
We’ve heard a lot about the “flipped classroom” lately. The premise makes perfect sense. The traditional classroom devotes class time to pushing content to the student, while the student engages that content outside class as “homework.” The problem is that if the student encounters problems
Inquiry-based instruction begins with the instructor posing a problem that students figure out how they will study. Students select variables and decide on procedures guided by faculty questions. The method has been used mostly in the sciences, but the basic approach is adaptable to many
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