As teachers, we spend countless hours staying up late, reading essays, and making comments to help our students improve. We walk a delicate line, wanting to give students enough support to develop their papers while not overwhelming them with red ink. We carefully foster their
I mainly teach undergraduate writing and research methods classes and wanted to share my experiences with mind mapping, also referred to as concept mapping. I’ve found that using it can significantly improve student papers. It’s an excellent innovation that requires student writers to visualize how
Interest in virtual reality (VR) has exploded over the past year, with news agencies, sports teams, and gaming companies creating VR content. But its adoption in education has been hampered by confusion between two different meanings of the term. When VR first emerged a number
Racially-charged issues are all around us — controversy over the killing of unarmed black men by white police officers; the slaughter of nine black people during a Charleston, S.C. church service by a young white man who said he wanted to start a race war;
Do we communicate more with students in writing than we used to? I think so. In addition to the course syllabus, the usual handouts, and written feedback on papers, projects, and performances, we now share all kinds of electronic messages with students. We exchange emails,
There’s more to the flip than just telling students to complete the work before class and then turning them loose when they arrive in the classroom.
Chaos will emerge. Students will get frustrated. You will get overwhelmed. Learning will not happen.
It’s a simple lesson:
Eleven years ago, I discovered a life-changing pedagogy called team-based learning. It let me do things in large classrooms that I didn’t think was possible. I found that the key to successful team-based learning was writing really good multiple-choice questions. I would like to look
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Reflect on these questions and then discuss them with a colleague, with your department, or with other interested parties:
If you are a professor of a certain age, you may have had the experience that I had in my first semester of teaching. I asked, “Who’s seen Norma Rae?” (I wanted to use it to illustrate that working in a mill causes hearing loss.)
