On the first day of classes two years ago, I had students in my professional and technical writing course send me an email with their goals for the semester. I discovered they had no understanding of goals, expectations, or objectives. I realized there are reasons
When student ratings first started being widely used and the research associated with them was prolific, many faculty objected to the focus on teaching effectiveness. “It shouldn’t be about me! I’m a good teacher if my students are learning. Measure how much my students have
In the article referenced below, biologist Kimberly Tanner proposes a set of strategies to ensure that “all students have opportunities to verbally participate, all students can see their personal connections to biology, all students have time to think, all students can pose ideas and construct
For many of us, learning to teach in a different way is a long and not always easy journey. Old habits die hard. Moreover, most of us are not particularly well-prepared to confront the task. We have copious amounts of content knowledge but lack great
Use of online quizzing continues to grow. If taken online, quizzes don’t consume valuable class time. Grading occurs automatically and doesn’t consume valuable teacher time. Students get feedback immediately. The technology also offers a variety of format options. But do we know anything about how
Students need to be able to make decisions about learning on their own. Are there instructional behaviors teachers can use that move students in that direction? There are, and the research highlighted here offers one very practical set of teacher behaviors that increase student autonomy.
Most would agree that the classroom is a place for discourse, reflection, and learning. But whose class is it? Who’s doing the learning? The teacher or the students? We submit it’s both—teacher and students learning from each other. Too often, faculty see themselves as the
When Washington University School of Law enlisted the help of 2U, Inc., (www.2u.com) to develop its online master of laws program, the challenge was to figure out how to make the Socratic case method work in an online environment.
If you use collaborative assignments in your online course, you should assess those assignments collaboratively, said Rena Palloff, online instructor and coauthor (with Keith Pratt) of several online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), during a recent
For the past 100 years, folks in higher education have assumed that feedback must be written. Even when the assignment itself was not in text form, such as a video, instructors usually provided written comments. But feedback can be given in a myriad of different
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