reflections on teaching
In a commentary about to be published in College Teaching, author and teacher Ellen Ballock writes about a set of student papers she found disappointing. I’m guessing that will resonant with most of us. Teachers ...
When our teaching focuses entirely on learning outcomes, we can become narrowly focused on seeing our students as skillsets. This can lead us to break learning into smaller and smaller parts so that we can ...
We start new courses with a raft of good intentions, especially when they begin during this season of resolutions. We aspire to have assignments graded promptly, learn students’ names quickly, wait patiently for answers, try ...
Fresh from winter break, my students want to test my boundaries—and they should. But even as they challenge me, many of my students will also limit themselves by defining their intelligence and talents as fixed ...
They Hate
When I meet with faculty, I often talk about the importance of moving our conversations about teaching beyond the “tips and tricks” to the kind of thought-provoking discussions that help promote, motivate, and sustain our ...
Intellectual messiness is one of those perfect descriptors. I’m not sure where it originated, but I do like it, probably because messiness abounds in my mind. I have been frustrated lately by how old I ...
“All teachers can improve; most should.” Did someone tell me this or did I make it up? I’ll put it in quotes because I’m not sure, but it’s a one-liner I like. To improve means ...
Has teaching improved? It’s a question I’ve been putting to myself here on the backside of a long career. Without beginning benchmarks it’s hard to say for sure, maybe a bit, but not as much ...
When a discussion didn’t go anywhere. When a group couldn’t seem to work together. When the answer was wrong. When the grade was unexpected. When not all that many students are paying attention.
It’s hard to say—we have no definitive measures of learner-centeredness or even mutually agreed upon definitions. And yet, when we talk about it, there’s an assumption that we all understand the reference. My friend Linda recently ...
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