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Smile, and the Whole Class Smiles with You

“When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You),” first published in 1928 by Shay, Fischer, and Goodwin, has been recorded by many artists. My favorite is the 1929 version by Louis Armstrong. “Oh, when you smilin’, when you smilin’, the whole world smiles with

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The Art of Reading the Classroom

“Who’s ready to read some poetry?”

My voice echoed off the beige walls, an octave too enthusiastic. None of my students so much as stirred in response: not a blink, not a fidget, not so much as an at-least-she’s-trying smile.

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Establishing Class Norms That Promote Learning

In 1936, psychologist Muzafer Sherif reported a landmark study on the creation of social norms. Sherif made use of an optical illusion called the autokinetic effect. When people view a stationary pinpoint of light in a dark environment, they will perceive the light to move

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Tailgating for Teachers: Building Community before Day One

I’m hopelessly unathletic, which means I’ve usually observed the rituals at the so-called sports school where I teach from a distance—until recently, that is, when a student invited me to something called “tailgating.” My takeaway? The sense of belonging and excitement that I witnessed during

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Teaching in a Polarized Classroom

I teach psychology to students who are largely from rural and low-income areas. In my courses we discuss a wide range of topics that have the potential for controversy, such as sexuality and gender, best parenting practices, racism and implicit bias, and the neuroscientific

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Your Learning Space: Friend or (Secret) Foe?

While teaching and working from home during the pandemic, I developed a new respect for staying active and getting outside; new studies prove how much physical movement and nature matter to human wellbeing.

This is a takeaway worth applying to campus environments: academic spaces tangibly

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Transforming Classroom Culture

For all the talk in faculty development circles about transforming our classrooms, there is very little guidance for faculty attempting to navigate the mindset shifts necessary to approach their work differently. We each want to create a classroom where our students feel included and able

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Classroom Climate and the Syllabus

Classroom climate “profoundly shapes” the experience of both instructor and students. That’s a claim made by two authors of a study that looked at syllabi from sociology courses to see what they said about classroom climate (Valentin & Grauerholz, 2019, p. 219). They found that

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