I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me
Have you ever struggled to get students to do required readings? Do your students treat them as optional? Perhaps they do the readings, but when you ask them to engage in critical discussion or think deeply about the material, they are unable to do so.
Lecture as a pedagogical approach has come under considerable fire in recent years. Indeed, critics have called lectures boring, obsolete, old-fashioned, overused, and even unfair, among other, less-flattering terms. The criticisms, however, have most often been leveled at one type of lecture: the full-class-session, transmission-model
Every fall now I cull my large teaching and learning article database. Yes, it’s a filing cabinet full of paper copies. Copies were the only option when I started collecting articles. But the cabinet is at capacity, and some of the very old, outdated pieces
A new academic year is about to begin, and, well, there’s this course—maybe more than one—that you’re not exactly bristling with excitement to teach. What should you do?
Humor has a place in education. College teachers can use it to create a welcoming classroom environment, increase learning, improve attendance, and reduce test anxiety (Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez, & Liu, 2010). Such results should encourage all who teach to explore how to integrate humor into
When I look at the various articles and comments in the Teaching Professor collection, group work continues to be a regular topic. It’s proved itself an instructional method of equal parts possibilities and problems. From a well-designed and well-implemented group activity, students can have rich
Many instructors incorporate teamwork into their courses to teach skills that are critical for academic and business success. Yet many students and faculty also dread the inevitable problems that doing groupwork—face-to-face or online—creates. It can be difficult to ensure equal participation by all team members,
The Choose Your Own Nursing Adventure was created from an interest to see how technology could be integrated into the traditional case study approach to enhance student engagement. The approach is modeled on the popular children series from the 1980s and 1990s, Choose Your Own
Long before the written word, humans relied on stories to entertain, instruct, and preserve cultural traditions. Storytelling is a fundamental way that humans communicate, and yet it is often left out of the college classroom. Rather than telling students stories about how something works or
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