“Zip! Zap! Zop!” my 15-year-old son cried as he wildly waved his arms. “My math teacher makes us do this exercise halfway through class. You should try it with your students.”
You’ve prepared a fabulous, interactive class. You’ve designed engaging activities, developed meaningful discussion questions, and cultivated an inviting atmosphere for dialogue. You ask a wonderful open-ended question, anticipating a flurry of discussion and critical thinking—only to be met with silence. Your students stare back at
Several years into my 30-year career as a professor, I had an experience that ultimately upended my entire approach to teaching. I came to see the conventional classroom in a whole new way—as a sensory deprivation chamber—and developed a hands-on antidote I call “thinking
Do you teach a 50-minute class? Or perhaps you teach a longer block of time: 75 minutes, three hours, or even six hours, like I am currently doing? Lecture breaks can be used every 20 to 30 minutes to enhance student learning by providing:
●
Guest speakers can be powerful mechanisms to promote student learning and provide additional perspectives on course material. They can help students grasp topics that require more expertise than the instructor may possess and offer insight into the day-to-day workings of a particular career path. Still,
As teachers and instructional designers, one of the biggest challenges we face is trying to come up with multiple creative and appropriately challenging activities for our courses. We have to consider the diverse needs of our learners and the goals of the course and then
As part of our teaching philosophy, we believe in the value of exploring contentious issues with our students to encourage civic engagement and effective leadership. When we introduce contentious issues in the classroom, we define a contentious topic as one that is (1) debatable and
For years I have used a game I call the Blame Game in my Intellectual Heritage I classes. Intellectual Heritage I is an interdisciplinary course in critical reading that focuses on works of literature, philosophy, and religion. Several of the texts I use in this
In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft famously declares that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” It’s the experience of this sort of fear that
In our polarized political climate, fuelled by dissension, misinformation, and echo chambers, there is no shortage of contentious issues. By “contentious,” we use Zimmerman and Robertson’s (2017) definition: an issue is contentious if it is (1) debatable and inconclusive among experts and (2) deeply important
