Imagine this: You have just given instructions for the day’s class activity, designed to test a theory chronicled in the previous week’s readings. But the proposed assignment doesn’t land the way you anticipated. One courageous ...
It is best practice to open online courses with a welcome to students. The online format will be new for many students—in particular, adult students who are returning to school after a long absence—and they ...
“Welcome to class, and by the way, when you review the course syllabus, you will see that one-third of your mark will come from group work.” For many of us teaching in a postsecondary setting, the ...
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 ...
With all the unrest and violence that has rocked our country over the past few years, this fall you might be giving added attention to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in your courses. ...
The past 18 months brought us to see systemic challenges and disparities in higher education. The new emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion has pushed each of us to recognize hidden barriers and inequities that ...
Experience shows that online courses naturally lend themselves to more self-disclosure on the part of faculty and students than face-to-face courses do, possibly due to the increased quantity of discussion. Most large lecture courses have ...
Online community is an important part of an effective online classroom, but it can often be difficult to establish. This is true regardless of the modality. One of the most commonly used frameworks for building ...
When my institution closed because of the pandemic, I was asked to teach an entirely virtual organic chemistry course (class and lab) in the 2020 summer semester. This was the first entirely virtual organic course ...
A healthy academic community treats its members as honest people. As scholars, we presume that our colleagues earned their degrees without cheating, that they report the results of their research accurately, that they write their ...
Imagine this: You have just given instructions for the day’s class activity, designed to test a theory chronicled in the previous week’s readings. But the proposed assignment doesn’t land the way you anticipated. One courageous student challenges the purpose and relevance of the assignment in front of the entire class. An uncomfortable silence fills the classroom. You take a breath. Now what?
“We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything” (Spolin, 1999, p. 3). Viola Spolin, educator, performer, and the godmother of improvisation, created a game-based system of actor training that gave rise to The Second City in Chicago. I studied this improvisational method. That was years before embarking on my professional journey as a special education teacher, college professor, college of education dean, and now director of faculty development. Decades since my early training as an improvisational performer, Spolin’s wisdom still guides my perspective on teaching and learning. Here are five basic principles gleaned from those early years as a drama geek.
Immordino-Yang, M. H., Darling-Hammond, L., & Krone, C. R. (2019). Nurturing nature: How brain development is inherently social and emotional, and what this means for education. Educational Psychologist, 54(3), 185–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1633924
Immordino-Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2007.00004.x
Kafka, A. C. (2021). Building students’ resilience: Strategies to support their mental health. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Spolin, V. (1999). Improvisation for the theatre: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques (3rd ed.). Northwestern University Press.
Sandra Beyda-Lorie, PhD, is the executive director for learning innovations at Northeastern Illinois University’s Center of Teaching and Learning. Her teaching background includes special education, secondary education (English and speech and theatre). She believes in the power of welcoming, inclusive, and culturally responsive learning environments that leverage students’ strengths, perspectives, and abilities.