For Those Who Teach

When Teaching Fails

I’m wanting to explore teacher responses to students who, for many reasons, may be slow to learn what we teach, and those who, for other reasons, resist our teaching efforts. I am interested in those students and their responses, but for the moment I’d like

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Student Peer Review and Learning

Sometimes it’s good to step back and take a look at something from a distance. Meta-analyses provide some of that perspective. They take a bundle of individual studies, combine their findings, and offer an empirical view of a phenomenon—in this instance, students reviewing their peers.

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An Update on Study Strategies

A number of resources that we’ve published address student study strategies, particularly the ones they don’t use that research says do connect to learning. (See the links at the end of the article.) In a nutshell, students gravitate toward passive study strategies, and those don’t

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Finding Course Design Flaws

In the rural part of North Central Pennsylvania where I live, a lot of families have owned the same farmland for generations. Houses are handed down, with each new family adjusting the home to their needs—adding a porch here, a back bedroom there, an attachment

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What Teachers Learn from Experience

What qualifications does it take to be considered for a faculty position at a four-year college or university? Guy Boysen (2021) recently answered that question for the field of psychology. He surveyed 267 faculty, asking them to describe the minimal research and teaching qualifications needed

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When Students Should Question Teacher Authority

In my previous column I addressed what makes it difficult for students to speak up in peer groups, especially to express opinions different from those that others in the group offer. As I’ve noted before, some columns continue to follow me around, and this one

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Helping Students Find Their Voice in Peer Groups

Performing among peers is never easy. I’ve seen great teachers tremble before a group of colleagues as they speak about an instructional practice they’ve developed. The fear grows out of not finding respect among equals. Academic professionals end up having lots of experience in peer

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Leadership in Student Groups

When you use group work—say, for a project or assignment—do you appoint group leaders? André (2011) was under the impression that most of us use leaderless groups, and that hunch was confirmed by a review of 104 Journal of Management Education articles in which teachers

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Those Daily Decisions about What Happens in a Course

I read a quote this week that has been following me around. It expresses a view fairly common among faculty, I suspect. The article (D’Abate et al., 2018) in which it appears focuses on the need for teachers to support students’ work in groups. The

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More on Learning from Exams

My interest in making exams more about learning and less about grades continues. I’m also a realist: exams will always be about grades. But could they please be at least a bit more about learning? The best way to increase learning focus is with strategies

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