I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after
The internet is full of people voluntarily sharing information for the benefit of others. It originated as a means for government and academic researchers to share information (The Online Library Learning Center, n.d.), but this sharing really took off with the advent of social media,
In last week’s column, I cautioned that while peer review has many benefits, these aren’t automatic, and there’s also the potential for harm. Here’s a rundown of the challenges that come with the strategy and ways to minimize them. The peer-review activities themselves can be
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student. Even if you have 270, that’s still 10 minutes per student. Recently I’ve been working to make the most of
Behance is a digital portfolio system that is popular among artists. This makes it ideal for visual art students to develop their professional resumes for use after graduation. But portfolios have many uses beyond displaying work for business; they can also be used as teaching
Students can learn a lot from peer assessment, whether they look at each other’s written work (papers, lab reports, informal reaction papers); presentations (speeches, panel participation, online discussion facilitation); performances (art, athletics, theatrical musical); or other contributions (group work). The ultimate responsibility for grading remains
I find that the terminology used in textbooks in my discipline of applied behavior analysis (ABA) tends to lack any cultural context or descriptors that might connect today’s student to the text in a meaningful way. Textbooks are written by academics and so represent an
Students need feedback that helps them improve, and that includes identifying their errors. Without corrective feedback, efforts to improve limp along. But do students need what we typically dish out? I was a bit disconcerted by findings in a recent cross-disciplinary survey. The researchers (Knight
For all the talk in faculty development circles about transforming our classrooms, there is very little guidance for faculty attempting to navigate the mindset shifts necessary to approach their work differently. We each want to create a classroom where our students feel included and able
In the very first article I ever wrote for The Teaching Professor, I quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory
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