How students discuss content in courses continues to be a concern Whether the exchange occurs the classroom, in a group, or online, most of us have heard students making assertions, never mentioning evidence, feeling free to comment when they are unprepared, and mostly agreeing with
Anyone who has used group projects in their teaching knows that they can be a double-edged sword. While they can teach valuable collaboration skills that students will need in their professional and personal lives, they can also falter when students cannot get themselves organized enough
We learn by connecting new information to prior knowledge (Palfreman, 1992). Much of this involves categorizing information according to patterns. Whereas the average American football fan just sees 11 individual defenders on the field, a veteran NFL quarterback sees the formation within the context of
“One of the best ways to be bad at something is to tell yourself that you are bad at it” (Holmes, 2021, p. 293). This applies to students who believe they can’t take tests. “Despite the prevalence of the bad test-taker as part of the
I have long pondered a phrase I learned from a mentor: “Witness the struggle.” Frances, my mentor, used the phrase when she talked about working with students in emotional pain. She was referring to those students who sometimes lash out in frustration over missed assignments,
I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after
The internet is full of people voluntarily sharing information for the benefit of others. It originated as a means for government and academic researchers to share information (The Online Library Learning Center, n.d.), but this sharing really took off with the advent of social media,
In last week’s column, I cautioned that while peer review has many benefits, these aren’t automatic, and there’s also the potential for harm. Here’s a rundown of the challenges that come with the strategy and ways to minimize them. The peer-review activities themselves can be
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student. Even if you have 270, that’s still 10 minutes per student. Recently I’ve been working to make the most of
Behance is a digital portfolio system that is popular among artists. This makes it ideal for visual art students to develop their professional resumes for use after graduation. But portfolios have many uses beyond displaying work for business; they can also be used as teaching
