I sometimes worry that we don’t think about the syllabus as expansively and creatively as we could. We focus, almost exclusively it seems to me, on what should be on it—the information and details it should contain. We do much less thinking about the role
Students arrive in our courses with a variety strengths and weaknesses. In a writing course, some students may struggle with grammar, while others are ready to practice alternative styles of discourse or more sophisticated rhetorical techniques.
How many of us teachers have had this experience? You spend an afternoon reading student work and providing detailed feedback. You return the work convinced that your notes will help students deepen their learning and meet the course objectives. Then you see students glancing at
Call me crazy, but undergraduate courses should be qualitatively different from their high school antecedents. One key change? At the college level, students should be moving toward understanding things instead of just knowing them. How can we introduce and reinforce the difference?
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
Do these learning devices deserve a bigger space in our instructional tool boxes? They’re sort of taken-for-granted aspects of teaching and learning. We know where they belong: at the end or beginning of a session, a topic, a unit/module, a chapter, a set of related
Instructors spend a considerable amount of time planning the topics, content, and activities in their courses, but comparatively little time thinking about the syllabus. The syllabus often is treated as an afterthought at the end of course development and is used to summarize basic information
I decided last spring to implement a new teaching strategy: individual midterm conferences with every student enrolled in my classes. That’s approximately 75 students total. Throughout my years of teaching, I’d heard colleagues report that meeting with students individually during the semester had a positive
Snapchat is a video/photo-sharing app that has become nearly ubiquitous with young people due to a couple of unique features. One, the shared content automatically disappears after a set time. A shared Snap (a single image or video) goes away after being viewed by the
Do you have students who don’t deliver good work? Sometimes it’s a case of not having the necessary skills, but not always. Students with skills have been known to deliver papers that show promise but aren’t well organized, fail to explore interesting ideas deeply, haven’t
