I was traveling again last week and dining by myself in a local restaurant. I had forgotten to bring something to read, but the restaurant, named the The Library, had stacks of old books decorating the short walls between different sections of the dining room. In the stack near my table I found Teacher Education [...]
The Teaching Professor Blog
Feedback: Negative, Positive or Both?
Posted Thursday, August 26th, 2010 by Maryellen Weimer“Feedback by nature must be negative to an extent if it is to be helpful in improving performance. Much of the feedback that instructors give on assignments is to specifically point out the shortcomings of a student’s work and motivate the student toward improvement. Such feedback is intended to be received as ‘constructive criticism.’ However, [...]
Students’ Messages to Teachers
Posted Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerLast week I participated in a beginning of the academic year event for faculty. It included a panel of bright, articulate upper-division students. From the audience came this question: “What are the things faculty do that you really hate?”
Stories
Posted Thursday, August 19th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerDad died on July 31. He was 98 and it was time, although I don’t think that makes the empty feeling any smaller.
Dad was very religious, attending the same small Bible church for 65 years, and he preached there regularly until just a couple of years ago. The elder who delivered the message at Dad’s [...]
Thinking Constructively About Teaching Problems
Posted Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 by Maryellen Weimer“One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a ‘problem’ in one versus the other. In scholarship and research, having a ‘problem’ is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions [...]
no posts this week
Posted Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 by rkellyThere will be no posts to The Teaching Professor Blog this week. Maryellen will be back next week.
Exam Wrappers
Posted Thursday, July 29th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerHere’s a strategy that helps students look at more than the grade when an exam is returned. An exam wrapper (I like the name) is a handout attached to the exam that students complete as part of the exam debrief process. The wrapper directs students “to review and analyze their performance (and the instructor’s feedback) [...]
Teaching for Transformative Learning
Posted Friday, July 23rd, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerPicking up where we left off on the previous post, so how do teachers intentionally teach for transformative learning? And how do they do that, given the fact that a teacher cannot make (as in require or force) students have a learning experience that changes what they believe, how they think, or how they act? [...]