An email query about teaching personas reminded me how much I haven’t figured out about our teaching identities. I’m still struggling with very basic questions and wondered if a conversation here might not get us all thinking more about how we present ourselves as teachers.
A lot of students are in love with their highlighters, especially those bright, fluorescent-colored ones. They use them to highlight course materials, sometimes underlining whole pages of text. When I first saw a text so fluorescent that it all but glowed, I wondered why in
The university population in the United States has grown increasingly diverse in the past 30 years, with international students making up between 10 percent and 20 percent of the enrollments at many universities. For the vast majority of international students, English is not their first
The benefits of group work are well known. Students develop critical thinking and enhanced reflection skills (Conrad & Donaldson, 2004). Group work promotes transformative learning while establishing a sense of community. There is a sense of positive interdependence when we are all in this together
Students in an online course can feel detached from the instructor and one another, so one of the most important things an online faculty member can do is send each student a welcome message. Welcoming students will kick off the learning relationship, and pay dividends
Stephen Brookfield is out with a third edition of The Skillful Teacher. Only a handful of books on teaching make it past the first edition so to be out with a third says something about the caliber of this publication. He notes in the preface
Faculty rely on quizzes for a couple of reasons. They motivate most students to keep up with their class work and, if they’re unannounced, they motivate most students to show up regularly for class. The research on testing offers another reason, something called “the testing
In 2000, Howe and Strauss identified the next big generation on the rise in colleges and universities and dubbed them the “Millennials.” Born between 1982 and 2002, these folks began arriving on our campuses in large numbers in the early 2000’s and continue to populate
The two professors who developed this assignment created it “to help us engage more directly with students about their writing.” (p. 146) Most teachers who now assign writing emphasize that it’s a process, not something a writer sits down and does all at once. As
Every now and then I like to bring another voice into the classroom. The students have their say, I have my say, and the assigned reading has its say. A guest speaker can be a nice way to shake up this routine, and video now
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