“Can I Do It?” Accurately Assessing Our Skills

My husband just took a wood-turning class, and the night before, he slept very little, worrying about his skills and whether he’d be able to complete the course projects. This from a person who builds houses, boats, and furniture, who forges knives, can repair just

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The Teacher as Lensmaker

When as a college sophomore I first encountered Benedict de Spinoza, I was fascinated by both his philosophy, which emphasizes intellectual freedom and pursuit of virtue, and the fact that by trade or profession he was a grinder of lenses.

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Teaching Virtual Presentation Skills

The pandemic has made web conferencing common in the professional world as distributed workforces are becoming the norm. This means that students need to develop virtual presentation skills as well as live ones. Here I will outline some of the most important virtual presentation principles

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Study Buddies: Learning with a Partner

Last week I happened onto something I’d written years ago about study buddies—two students who agree to study together in a course. I was describing a community college first-year seminar program that partnered students in the seminar and a general education course linked to it.

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Four R’s of Effective Evaluation

Because so much depends upon the evaluation of a student’s learning and the resulting grade, it is in everyone’s interest to try to make the evaluation system as free from irrelevant errors as possible. Borrowing from the evaluation literature, I propose the four R’s of

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Online Quizzing Changed How I Use Quizzes

Before March 2020, I believed firmly that frequent, in-class quizzes were a way to ensure students had prepared for class and had some understanding of the material. In fact, I was notorious for pop quizzes, although I did make it a practice of dropping the

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Knowledge Checks

1. I call my quizzes “knowledge checks.” The name emphasizes the primary purpose of the quiz—to discover what the student has not mastered in the assigned material. Students do not associate the word “quiz” with my formative intentions so I avoid using it.

2. Both my

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