Growth across a Teaching Career

Most teaching careers last for years; for many of us, a lifetime. With noses to the grindstone, we don’t usually take stock of where we are in light of where we’ve been. We know that we aren’t teaching as we did in the beginning. The

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An Empathetic Approach to Writing Rubrics

“Response shows a complete lack of understanding.”
“Piece had no style or voice.”
“Position is incoherent.”
“Thesis is utterly incompetent.”
“Weak.”
“Ineffective.”
“Unsatisfactory.”

This is some of the discouraging feedback that we found in an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional survey of assessment rubrics that we collected from online

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Easy Ways to Make Digital Storytelling Videos

The digital storytelling video format (sometimes called “audio slideshow”) is one of the simplest, yet most powerful, formats for delivering online lessons. By combining imagery found on the web with the creator’s narration, it integrates two sensory modalities to promote greater understanding and retention than

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Soft Skills: They’re Not All That Soft

Names matter. We have linguist S. I. Hayakawa to thank for making clear why: language influences how we think and act. And although it is possible to become overly sensitive to language, more often we err on the side of not recognizing its profound influence.

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Collaborative Note-Taking for Students

Here’s how collaborative notes typically work: on a rotating basis, students (usually one or two) take notes during class and then post them online. The collaborative notes are intended to support rather than replace individual note-taking, although they do provide absent students information about content

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How to Add Interactions to Your Videos

Retention improves when students can engage content at the time they encounter it, through questions or other interactions that move information from their immediate working memory to their long-term memory (Oakley & Sejnowski, 2018). But the modern learning management system (LMS) has not gone the

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Measuring Healthy Group Dynamics

The importance of small group dynamics is hard to overstate. Group functioning directly influences how well students learn the content, what they learn about working with others, and the attitudes they take with them from the experience. Most groups experience problems; while they usually start

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Skills: Which Ones Do Students Say They’re Learning?

We know what skills we want college students to learn. We list them in institutional mission statements, descriptions of our programs and majors, and our syllabi. We know what skills employers want graduates to obtain in college. They tell us, especially when students don’t have

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E-books for Teaching

E-books are becoming ever more popular in education. They are cheaper for students and better for the environment than print books, saving about 9.8 million trees per year (Wahl, 2018). They satisfy ADA requirements as the text can be enlarged and read by a print

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