Teaching Strategies and Techniques

Simple Tips for Engaging Students in Zoom

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, relatively few instructors had used web-based conferencing for teaching and learning. With the shift in the spring of 2020, many instructors suddenly found themselves teaching online courses, and many others found themselves teaching onsite with some students using videoconferencing to

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Using Imagery to Enhance Learning

Most faculty live in a world of words, whether it be lecturing, writing, or reading, and for this reason think in terms of text when creating learning modules. But images capture our attention in ways that words cannot. The video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

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The Value of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in Synchronous Online Learning Environments: 10 Steps That Can Make a Positive Change

Transforming an in-person course to an online teaching and learning environment is always challenging, especially if the course has a laboratory or studio component. As two co-instructors of a large introductory inquiry-based biology laboratory course with nearly 400 students enrolled, we faced such a challenge

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Strategies for Conducting Online Student-Teacher Writing Conferences

Conferences between student writers and their writing teachers are a time-honored staple of process-oriented writing instruction. Online classes, while they may incorporate many of the other elements of the writing process model, frequently omit writing conferences since the face-to-face, real-time format that is typical of

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Games as Study Aids

Studies show that many students do a poor job of studying (Miller, 2017). Quite a few just scan the readings again or cram the night before a test in hopes that the information will last until the next day. But neither strategy is especially effective.

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Escape Rooms for Increased Student Engagement

Escape rooms have become a cultural phenomenon over the past few years. Groups of people pay to be put into “locked” rooms they can escape only by solving a series of clues. But now education is starting to use escape rooms in both face-to-face and

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The Teaching Practices of Award-Winning Online Faculty

Swapna Kumar, Florence Martin, Kiran Budhrani, and Albert Ritzhaupt (2019) recently released the results of a study of the practices of online teachers who had won awards from one of three professional organizations. These practices, summarized below, can serve as guides for all online teachers.

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Simulations in Online Courses: Integrating Synchronous Experiential Learning Opportunities for Students in the Virtual Classroom

Educators have long praised the value of simulations and role-playing exercises and the impact of those experiential activities on student learning. As Bjorn Billhardt (2005) explains, “Simulations offer huge advantages over lectures, handbooks, or on-site trainers. They engage students while helping them retain and apply

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Taking Your Classes Online in a Flash

Most higher education institutions have put their classes online for the remainder of the term. Higher education is well positioned to take classes online because so much of teaching in higher education is lecture driven rather than reliant on one-on-one interactions as in the K–12

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abstract image of brainpower

Giving the Gift of Self-Directed Learning through Cognitive Wrappers

As instructors, we want our students to be self-directed learners. We want them to be able to evaluate their submissions and think through their learning process. In fact, thinking about one’s thinking improves understanding of content and assignment submissions (Bowen, 2013). But the challenge is

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The Teaching Professor Conference 2024

June 7-9, 2024 • New Orleans

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