As a writing teacher, I’ve discovered that counseling writers to sequence details logically does more for their writing, their readers, and their intellectual development than encouraging them to take risks or to make art. Plot really is everything. Not just in story writing but in
About seven years ago I wrote a blog post about a family meltdown. My manually dexterous and spatially oriented engineer spouse was trying to tell me and my not mentally gifted brother how to tie a load of boards on a cart. From his tractor
Long ago I learned that the best way to tour a city is by bike. A car isolates a tourist from a city, while a bike immerses them in it. A car is a means of racing from tourist destination to tourist destination in as
A few months after I received my university’s undergraduate teaching award in 2009, my classroom anxiety dreams went from merely hairy to absolutely hair-raising. For years, I’d dreamed about my classes erupting in chaos: rebellious students flipping over desks, watching pornography while I lectured, or—most
I recently discovered a 2014 study that reported on student-generated multiple-choice questions. It was the results that really caught my attention: “We find that these first-year students are capable of producing very high quality questions and explanations” (Bates, Galloway, Riise, & Horner, 2014, p. 10).
The University of West Alabama’s (UWA’s) education and nursing programs have hands-on field experiences during which instructors watch the students teach or work in a health-care environment and provide feedback on their work. When the programs went online, the institution faced the problem of providing
If you have attended a professional conference, then you have likely experienced or are familiar with breakout sessions. These typically short workshops occur in a space separate from and smaller than that of the keynote presentation and allow attendees to dive deeper into a topic
This is a required course. To many of you it looks (and may well be) unrelated to your major and your interests. If it weren’t required, you wouldn’t take it. Moreover, it may be a course in which you’ll do things you don’t like to
A new survey documents what most teachers already know: students don’t devote much time to their course-assigned readings (Sharma, Van Hoof, & Ramsay, 2019). And that’s not counting students who are doing their very best to get through a course without reading. In this survey,
It is widely assumed among faculty that students reward easy grades with good evaluations, which then becomes reason to dismiss student evaluations as unreliable. But a meta-analysis of various studies testing this hypothesis found that while some showed a minor correlation between grades and evaluations,
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