For Those Who Teach

Giving Metaphors a Second Look: Teaching as Selling

Few metaphors have generated more objections than equating students to customers and education to a product. It faces challenges on multiple fronts. Tuition dollars do not buy grades or a degree. Education does not come with a money-back guarantee, and the customer is not always

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Another Way into Your Teaching Philosophy

Part of the lasting impact of the scholarship on teaching philosophies highlighted in my previous column results from the activities the authors (Beatty et al., 2009) developed to help faculty find their way to beliefs and a philosophy. The first, a guided imagery exercise, uses

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Teaching Philosophies: Time for a Revisit

Several discipline-based teaching journals now annually recognize articles that have had lasting impact. It’s a great way to honor pieces of scholarship that have advanced our understanding of important pedagogical issues and improved practice in the process. The Journal of Management Education recently honored two

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Building Students’ Confidence with Exemplars

We expect a lot of students as learners these days. Knowledge acquisition now means more than just receiving information. It involves students in actively constructing knowledge using what they know to make sense of the new content and its application. Learning at its best requires

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The Effects of Requirements on Learning

Students must comply with lots of educational requirements. They take “required” general education and major courses. Sometimes the sequences of those courses is also mandated. In most courses students must submit required assignments on specified due dates. Policies mandate student actions, such as attendance, participation,

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Mapping the Complexities of Learning

“Student learning is remarkably complex . . .” So begins the second sentence of a lengthy article proposing a research-based conceptual framework that identifies cognitive challenges to learning and how teachers can respond to them. The framework rests on three premises:

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Looking for Learning in the Transition to Online Courses

As Regan Gurung pointed out in his May 2020 article, teaching during the pandemic merits analysis. The fast transition to online instruction was terribly challenging and not to be repeated (we can only hope). And although learning how to respond during a pandemic is important,

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Improving How Students Give and Receive Peer Feedback

There’s advice and there are activities that can help develop students’ abilities to offer constructive feedback and use the feedback they receive from peers to more accurately self-assess and improve their work. Those aren’t skills that college students today widely possess, but they’re skills that

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Learning from Exemplars

Exemplars are “carefully chosen samples of student work which are used to illustrate dimensions of quality and clarify assessment expectations” (p. 1315). In addition to offering this definition, Carless and Chan (2017) provide a rationale for using them: “Unless students have a conception of what

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Trying to Do All That Helps Students Learn—It’s Too Much!

In last week’s column I highlighted work that proposes ways of increasing the impact of the feedback teachers provide students. Doing so requires more feedback opportunities and activities—bottom line: more work for teachers. That got me thinking about how much of what I write in

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