Lecture as a pedagogical approach has come under considerable fire in recent years. Indeed, critics have called lectures boring, obsolete, old-fashioned, overused, and even unfair, among other, less-flattering terms. The criticisms, however, have most often ...
If you teach, you know about learning outcomes. Unless you inherited your courses from someone else, you’ve developed lists of them. You’ve probably had to submit these lists to the administration to be reviewed and ...
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 ...
The new academic year is fast approaching, and course preparations are either underway or on everyone’s mind. We begin every semester, every year, wanting all our courses to go well. Even more importantly, we want ...
Around an image of Yoda’s face, block letters urge, “Read the syllabus you must.” This meme represents a common complaint among college instructors, particularly those who teach online classes: that students do not follow syllabus ...
One of my primary objectives in my upper-level history classes is for students to develop their research skills. This involves the long, laborious task of sifting through primary and secondary sources to identify patterns and ...
Students can learn from and with each other in groups; that’s been well-established in the research. But student learning in groups doesn’t happen automatically, and it doesn’t happen regularly unless the group activity is carefully ...
We’ve chosen to finish up our series on assignments with information on learning logs. Like the innovative and interesting assignments we plan to continue highlighting, learning logs are versatile and can be used to accomplish ...
Our March installment in the collection of materials on assignments included an assignment template we proposed could be used as part of the assignment design process. We used the template to describe an assignment in ...
Students often put in a great deal of time and energy into learning course material, yet their efforts are often less than fruitful. Week after week, we witness students arriving to lecture—seemingly prepared—armed with planners, ...