Last September, we issued a call for information on handouts—how do you use them, how well do they work, what learning goals are they especially well-suited to accomplish? As with previous calls, you responded with ...
Financial experts have long known that various “nudges”—techniques and policies that influence people while still leaving them with freedom of choice—can induce people to save more of their income. One such technique uses visualization: technology ...
Higher education tends to bow down to Bloom as the oracle of educational objectives. Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, which ranks types of learning on six levels from “lowest” (remembering) to “highest” (creating), is a standard guide ...
A few years ago, educator Chris Emdin came to our community college campus to give an opening-of-school lecture to faculty. As the author and champion of what he calls “reality pedagogy,” Emdin delivered a passionate, ...
Now that many of us have moved to a hybrid or online format, the conversation around student-to-content and student-to-student engagement has taken on a new level of significance and intention. We have developed a reading ...
Pete Burkholder recently published an interesting article in this newsletter questioning the widespread push in higher education for “engaging” student activities. He first adopts Jose Eos Trinidad et al.’s (2020) definition of engagement as “enjoyment” ...
Too often, faculty make content coverage the focus of lesson planning. They plan their courses around the topics they need to cover, which usually leads to them motoring through information that their students are supposed ...
Much of the discussion about the move to remote and online classes this school year has focused on the mechanics of such teaching—how to make online learning engaging, how to create community, how to use ...
There’s no shortage of materials pertaining to student engagement in higher ed. I’ve attended teaching conferences where anywhere between one-third and one-half of the sessions could be slotted under the engagement rubric. I’ve further found, ...