“Zip! Zap! Zop!” my 15-year-old son cried as he wildly waved his arms. “My math teacher makes us do this exercise halfway through class. You should try it with your students.”
We academics are lucky in many ways. Most individuals herald January 1 as a big time for resolutions, aiming to change big behaviors with the start of the New Year. When you teach, you have at least two (on the semester system), sometimes three opportunities
As he reflected on his upcoming 60th birthday, Rob LaZebnik, a writer for The Simpsons, saw his worst fear coming true: He was becoming boring. Rather than embracing the challenge and growth that comes from novel experiences, he found himself settling into the comfort of
Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama have become powerful tools that can boost productivity and learning support, but they also undermine academic integrity by making it easier for students to submit unoriginal or automated work. How can we keep assessments purposeful, relevant, and
Building rapport with students from the very first day of class is a cornerstone of effective teaching, and a fundamental, yet often overlooked, step in this process is learning their names immediately. While it might seem like a minor detail amid the hustle and bustle
Have you ever invested a lot of time and energy into planning a new learning activity or assignment only to be disappointed with the response you received from students? Prototyping and testing your new design may help.
What does it mean to succeed without learning? That is a question I have wrestled with since last spring, when students in an introductory programming course I teach submitted assignments with computer code that was unusually advanced, well-structured, efficient, and carefully annotated. But when faced
As coauthor Joe Keller prepared to revise his syllabus for the upcoming semester, he kept thinking about a moment from a previous course. A student turned in a research paper so polished he assumed they had help—and he was right. It was not plagiarism, but
As I examined students’ work and tracked their progress in the past few years, I observed a consistent pattern: many students were still repeating the same mistakes, showing limited improvement in conceptual understanding, and struggling with the language of mathematics. It became increasingly clear that
It was midway through week four of the fall semester. The preservice teacher candidates sat in small groups, reviewing their assignments from the previous week. One student’s brow furrowed as she read her feedback, stopping on the comment “Add more differentiation for diverse learners.” She
