Like many college faculty, my first teaching experience was in graduate school. I was woefully unprepared to teach but blissfully ignorant of that fact. I had sat through three informal meetings on how to teach given by fellow graduate students who had taught a few
Books and journals on college teaching are chock full of best practices, compelling activities, and successful ideas for the classroom. These resources do help, but also helpful are experiences at the unsuccessful end of the teaching spectrum. I am referring to clinkers – those best
In the face of a long, protracted pandemic with reports of exhaustion streaming in from all quarters, many educators may feel they were not able to teach as effectively as they would have liked to. This is the perfect time to revisit (or ask anew)
Why this article is worth discussing: For most teachers, change keeps their courses fresh and invigorated. It’s an antidote to all about teaching that doesn’t change: content fundamentals, courses taught, passive students, exams, assignments, and grading—a list we can polish off with committee work. Despite
Most teaching careers last for years; for many of us, a lifetime. With noses to the grindstone, we don’t usually take stock of where we are in light of where we’ve been. We know that we aren’t teaching as we did in the beginning. The
A few months after I received my university’s undergraduate teaching award in 2009, my classroom anxiety dreams went from merely hairy to absolutely hair-raising. For years, I’d dreamed about my classes erupting in chaos: rebellious students flipping over desks, watching pornography while I lectured, or—most
I’ve put together a lot of bibliographies in my day. They’re more like resource collections than comprehensive listings of relevant published work, which are pretty much impossible when it comes to teaching and learning where the literature spreads across our disciplines and in disciplines devoted
When teachers are tasked with developing an online course, their thinking often follows along these lines: This is what I do in class. How can that be translated online?
What if we reversed our thinking?
Instead of assuming what’s done on ground is ideal, what
It’s an instructional development workshop. Will you attend? It might be on campus, a multi-campus event, or a session at a conference. Workshops, like those offered on professional development days or at conferences are the oldest and most common initiative to improve teaching and learning.
There’s no question that the climate for teaching at an institution has a direct impact on teaching at that institution, especially when it come to the value placed on teaching. It also influences the motivation to keep working on teaching. But what exactly makes up
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