The Best Time to Prep for Fall? Right Now
Nichole DeWall
May 12, 2025
I hear you already: “I barely survived this academic year. The last thing I want to think about is the next one!”
I hear you already: “I barely survived this academic year. The last thing I want to think about is the next one!”
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the most fitting definition of the word light-hearted (sic)for my purposes is this one: “Characterized by cheerfulness or easiness; amusing, entertaining.” I have been teaching for nearly 34 years—more than 70 semesters, including summer classes—and for as long as I
Most professional program curricula focus on the required specialized knowledge and skills to meet the profession’s needs. Yet graduates need more than subject matter competencies to meet the requirements of their professional work. Our graduates must be capable of solving complex problems and have dynamic
In Rasselas, Samuel Johnson’s philosopher Imlac offers the following bleak assessment of life: “Human life is every where [sic] a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” ([1759] 1999, 31). Having been a teacher for more than 30 years,
How do you approach the final weeks of your course? Most of us include some sort of summation activity: a final review, a course evaluation, sometimes a reflective paper.
Recently, I have begun to incorporate these kinds of activities much earlier in my courses, with
Many years ago, I taught college composition at a small art and illustration college in Chicago. The students in my classes were a diverse and irrepressibly creative bunch with an intimidating range of writing confidence and experience—a true challenge for a relatively inexperienced writing
Peter Filene, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that “teaching is only as successful as the learning it produces.” Students bring a certain set of expectations, personalities ,and learning dynamics with them at the beginning of
With the end of the semester looming, how often have you begun class wondering where the students have gone? Does it seem like the first day of class had every seat filled, but now there are a lot more seats open? That used
The end of a term typically brings increased stress to educators. To borrow a term used by Cross and Dillon (2023), stress often “snowballs” throughout the term and then reaches a crescendo at the end. The reasons are varied: exam grading, essay grading, submission
We all do it. The semester is drawing to a close, the students are tired, we’re tired. There’s one more assignment to hand out, that major project that’s supposed to somehow capture from the entirety of students’ learning from the past semester. Back in week
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