I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me
I have fond memories of the start of the academic year, whether it was grade school or university. One such memory is bringing home my brand-new textbooks from the university bookstore. I love the feeling of opening up a new book—such promise, such potential. But
Time constraints—that’s what faculty consistently report as the reason they don’t implement changes in their teaching. It’s the barrier identified by almost 67 percent of 3,000 geosciences faculty (Riihimaki & Viskupic, 2020) and what 8 percent of faculty in a collection of departments at a
Zoom has become ubiquitous during the COVID-19 crisis to the point of even becoming the butt of a Saturday Night Live skit (NBC, April 11, 2020). But while it replaced the equally ubiquitous GoToMeeting seemingly overnight as the go-to app for hosting meetings, it is
earning is a dynamic, complex, and nonlinear process, and graphic organizers can help support this across a wide variety of learners and disciplines. “A graphic organizer is a visual and graphic display that depicts the relationships between facts, terms, and/or ideas” (Strangman et al., 2004,
Failure is a regular column topic—specifically, the need for students and their teachers to reorient to it as an opportunity for learning. Our natural inclination makes us want to run from it. We don’t need to intentionally fail; plenty of it happens without intention, and
I have never used videoconferencing in my online courses on grounds that they undermine the “anywhere, anytime” convenience of online learning. But with Zoom now becoming ubiquitous in the working world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have come to see that videoconferencing skills are
Students take notes on an assigned chapter—one page front and back. In addition to these notes that preview the content, students prepare reflective notes that connect the current reading with other content and generate questions about it. Both sets of notes are turned in and
In our previous article, we explored retrieval practice, spaced practice, and metacognition as strategies that provide more durable learning experiences for students. In our work as learning designers in the Colleges of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Business at Penn State University, we incorporate all
It always takes me longer than I plan when I do anything with my books. I look for one book and see another I haven’t looked at for a while. I look for something in a book and find something else of interest. Case in
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