Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don’t, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I’ve completely forgotten that I wish I’d remembered. Case in point…
Clearly we are not always accurate in predicting students’ learning. Of equal concern, though, is the certainty of our belief that students are learning. The roots of these cognitive errors may lie in the common phenomenon of overconfidence bias that social psychologists have written about
10/23/2019—This article now includes an update from the author.
There is nothing quite like a Friday afternoon. The hurry-up pressures of the week come to a halt, and I can catch my breath against the wide open space of a weekend. But Fridays are special for
Faculty can learn so much about teaching from each other. The challenge is finding ways to start and sustain conversations between faculty about teaching. This is the story of how journaling became the centerpiece of an unlikely but highly impactful teaching support group involving a
Five faculty, all belonging to the same interdisciplinary sociology department, decided that collectively they could improve student writing skills better than they could individually. “Our approach emphasizes that a collective effort need not be a department-wide, institutionalized one. Indeed, faculty can still collaborate and students
Any instructional practice that is new to you, such as group testing, giving students a role in creating a classroom policy, or getting students involved in assessment, is not just a new activity that requires attention to a new set of implementation details; it’s a
Teaching requires more than just a keen mind; it also demands emotional energy, and that is particularly true for new teachers. But what emotions do they experience? Are those feelings more positive than negative? Are certain emotions associated with particular teaching approaches? These are all
I’ve been delving a bit into the emotional aspects of teaching. They continue to be largely ignored in the research literature and in our discussions of teaching. Could that be because emotional things fit uncomfortably in the objective, rational, intellect-driven culture of the
In an article billed as a “field guide” to constructivism, three authors from the sciences focuses on cognitive constructivism and aims to equip faculty with what they need in order to determine how constructivist a learning activity is. The authors propose that constructivist activities can
I teach history and geography at a small college in rural Ohio, and like many in my profession, I’ve been watching the development of massive open online courses with some concern, particularly since MOOCs started being absorbed into curricula. In the office-door debates I engage
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