Nothing works quite as well as a good question when it comes to getting the intellectual muscles moving. Given the daily demands of most academic positions, there’s not much time that can be devoted to reflection about teaching. But good questions are useful because they
Course frameworks and structures have been changing during the past few years, in large part as a result of the many new options technology makes possible. For example, flipped courses change where most of the content acquisition occurs. Rather than teachers presenting in class with
Students often think of class sessions as isolated events—each containing a discrete chunk of content. Those who take notes during class will put the date along the top and then usually leave a space between each session, which visually reinforces their belief that the concepts
An email query about teaching personas reminded me how much I haven’t figured out about our teaching identities. I’m still struggling with very basic questions and wondered if a conversation here might not get us all thinking more about how we present ourselves as teachers.
A lot of students are in love with their highlighters, especially those bright, fluorescent-colored ones. They use them to highlight course materials, sometimes underlining whole pages of text. When I first saw a text so fluorescent that it all but glowed, I wondered why in
The university population in the United States has grown increasingly diverse in the past 30 years, with international students making up between 10 percent and 20 percent of the enrollments at many universities. For the vast majority of international students, English is not their first language.
The benefits of group work are well known. Students develop critical thinking and enhanced reflection skills (Conrad & Donaldson, 2004). Group work promotes transformative learning while establishing a sense of community. There is a sense of positive interdependence when we are all in this together
Students in an online course can feel detached from the instructor and one another, so one of the most important things an online faculty member can do is send each student a welcome message. Welcoming students will kick off the learning relationship, and pay dividends
Stephen Brookfield is out with a third edition of The Skillful Teacher. Only a handful of books on teaching make it past the first edition so to be out with a third says something about the caliber of this publication. He notes in
Faculty rely on quizzes for a couple of reasons. They motivate most students to keep up with their class work and, if they’re unannounced, they motivate most students to show up regularly for class. The research on testing offers another reason, something called
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Nothing works quite as well as a good question when it comes to getting the intellectual muscles moving. Given the daily demands of most academic positions, there's not much time that can be devoted to reflection about teaching. But good questions are useful because they can be carried with us and thought about now and then, here and there. And they can be chatted about with colleagues, in person or online.
The question set below was developed for a Teacher Beliefs Interview protocol that has been used to explore the beliefs of beginning secondary science teachers. The questions were derived from analysis of semi-structured interviews with more than 100 pre-service teachers.
These protocol questions are basic: They get to the bedrock on which most instructional practices rest. And they aren't questions that are relevant only to beginning teachers, as this slightly edited version of them shows.
There are many ways a question set like this can be used, starting with personal reflection. How long has it been since you've asked yourself questions like these? They are great questions for mentors to explore with those they are mentoring. Would it be worthwhile to tackle one or two of them in a departmental meeting? Could they be used to structure a faculty workshop or retreat session?
Do you think your answers to questions like these have changed over time, as you've changed or as students have changed? How interesting it would be to jot down some ideas and answers at the front end of a career and then to revisit them now and then across the years. Are the answers different depending on what course you're teaching or the level of the students enrolled in the course? Teaching online would certainly change your answers. Does teaching online make it more difficult to answer these types of questions?
It's summer and, although some of us are still teaching, for many of us it is a slower time, or at least an interval during which we have a bit more control over how we spend our time. So here's to finding a place in the shade with an appropriate beverage and some time spent considering these questions.
Reference: Luft, J. A., and Roehrig, G. H. (2007). Capturing science teachers' epistemological beliefs: The development of the Teacher Beliefs Interview. Electronic Journal of Science Education, 11 (2), 38-63.
