A hot moment is one of those classroom situations where you can feel the temperature shift. Someone makes a comment that lands wrong. Discussion gets charged. A student reacts—verbally or visibly—and suddenly the room isn’t about the lesson anymore. It’s about safety, power, and whether
Higher education has come to understand that AI is akin to the computer and the internet, a new technology that students will need to know how to use in the future. The problem, though, is that most instructors don’t know how students will use AI
Creativity scholars Kaufman and Glăveanu (2019) argue that “like love or happiness, creativity is everywhere and nowhere in academia” (p. 27). They make this claim within the context of scholarship, stating that while everyone has an opinion, creativity can be difficult to define and categorize.
What if the most powerful teaching tool wasn’t a new AI technology but humans helping other humans become teachers themselves? After two decades working with neurodiverse students who think differently, are brilliant, and struggle academically, I’ve discovered that the combination of metacognitive problem-solving instruction and
Picture this: You spend hours crafting a midterm exam that could provide valuable learning opportunities. Students get their exams back early in the course, leaving them plenty of time to improve before the final. Yet when you look at final exam results, you see that
There is an elusive win-win in teaching in which both teachers and students truly enjoy a class together. The teachers find pleasure and satisfaction in educating students, and the students are fully engaged in learning concepts they find interesting and meaningful. Unfortunately, some teachers and
We often hear faculty complain that students are not reading the course material. Studies consistently report low rates of reading compliance across disciplines, with students citing time pressures, unclear purpose, perceived irrelevance, and weak accountability structures as reasons for skipping assigned materials (Hoeft, 2012; Brost
Every teacher knows the challenge: Students complete homework at 9:00 p.m., get stuck, and have to wait until the next day’s class for help. By then, you’re facing a mountain of assignments that all show the same misconception.
“I spent hours on the Gulliver’s Travels reading—yes, hours—and I still didn’t get through the Lilliput section!” my student, Sarah, bemoaned after class one morning. I asked her to walk me through her approach.
Faculty training in higher education often emphasizes verbal participation as the primary indicator of student engagement. In graduate preparation, instructors learn to value quick interaction, frequent discussion, and other visible forms of participation. An “active” classroom commonly means one in which students speak often. Over
