It’s almost impossible to read blogs, articles, even books on teaching without seeing a multitude of suggestions for not “wasting” the first day of class by covering the syllabus, course schedule, class rules and routines, and the like. I’ve even written one myself (Brown, 2009).
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 been leveled at one type of lecture: the full-class-session, transmission-model
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 possibly revised. You might have been asked to map these
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
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 our students engaged and learning. And they begin each new
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 instructions. In many on-campus classes, instructors devote at least several
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 make discoveries.
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 designed. The areas listed below identify the essential components of
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 a range of learning out comes.
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 which students read the syllabus and responded to it in
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