Preparing to Teach

Meet Janus, the Roman God of Efficient Teaching

It took all the willpower I could muster to leave my cozy dorm room and make the snow-crunching slog across campus for my 8:00 a.m. Latin seminar. Minnesota winters are no joke. To entice us into attempting the trek, my professor began each class

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A Flipped Method for Assigning Readings

Evidence shows what many faculty already know: that many students are not doing the assigned readings for their classes. The numbers are striking. Today’s college student spends an average of six to seven hours per week on assigned readings, down from 24 hours in

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Too Exhausted to Take Students to an Event? Do It Anyway

On stage at The Comedy of Errors that night, long-lost twin brothers embraced to the swelling strains of “Amazing Grace”; offstage, in the seat next to mine, my Very Reluctant Student turned to me—misty-eyed, breathless—and whispered, 

“Whoa.”

This is your sign to take students

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Course Conclusion as Closure

Many years ago, I taught college composition at a small art and illustration college in Chicago. The students in my classes were a diverse and irrepressibly creative bunch with an intimidating range of writing confidence and experience—a true challenge for a relatively inexperienced writing

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What Is Your Why? A First-Day In-Class Activity

Like many people, I have days when the simple act of getting out of bed feels daunting, let alone going to campus, lecturing, meeting with students, attending faculty meetings, grading papers, and so on. These challenging days are often amplified by an internal dialogue

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Syllabus Blues? Try Reciprocal Peer Review

For university instructors, late July and August signal the transition from flexible, grading-free weekdays into long (re)orientation sessions and faculty meetings. Amidst city buses full of brightly colored T-shirts and the U-Hauls plaguing one-way campus streets, instructors often retreat to their cramped offices to

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Stock photo infographic showing global climate vulnerabilities

Getting Started with Infographic Assignments

Infographics have become a nearly ubiquitous accompaniment to written reports and presentations. For today’s students, visual communication skills are as important as written and verbal ones. Plus, adding an infographic to a text assignment gets students to think about the central message they are

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Teaching Unblindered

In a now-classic scene in Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV for those of you keeping track), pilot Luke Skywalker has one shot to destroy the Death Star. He must fly in a narrow channel and hit a small target. To concentrate, he

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