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?
Students look to teachers for leadership. The teacher is the person in charge—the course’s designated person in charge. That’s hardly revelatory, but how does leadership inform our practice? Do we think reflectively and critically about our roles as leaders? With a new academic year about
Many faculty (probably most who read this column) willingly do a great many things to help students learn. For example, we know that our courses are jammed with content and that it’s hard for a lot of students to figure out what they need to
Do the things we know about how students learn apply to faculty when they’re learning about teaching? That question follows me around. I think about for a while, forget it, and then bump into it again. My latest encounter happened yesterday, when I decided to
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
If a visitor from another planet dropped in to observe teaching in North America (maybe other places as well), they’d likely conclude that teaching could not occur without PowerPoint slides. And they’re not just in classrooms; they’re part and parcel of all kinds of professional
Implementation fidelity—it’s another of those academically impressive descriptions that isn’t nearly as profound as it sounds. It relates to whether a strategy or approach is being implemented as it was originally designed and used. Most often it refers to replicating research, but it has important
I think the active learning versus lecture debate is finally moving on to more useful questions than which one is better. Now there’s interest in deciding when to lecture and when to use active learning. When do we make those decisions, and are we making
Online discussions aren’t a new thing anymore; they regularly occur in online courses and courses with online components. What we’ve learned for sure: they’re a mixed bag. On the plus side, they make participation safer. Students can make a post, walk away, and not worry
A recent study found that professors and students aren’t on the same page when it comes to the course syllabus (Lightner & Benander, 2018). How about you and your students? As faculty, we probably don’t all see eye to eye, but most of us consider
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