There are purists among us who would say that we should never lecture, but I don’t think that’s terribly realistic, and I’m still not ready to totally rule out lectures. As faculty, we bring expertise to learners and having an expert around when you don’t
Peter Burkholder’s recently published piece in The History Teacher (highlighted in the October issue of The Teaching Professor) is another reminder of how much we need a different way of thinking about course content.
We all pretty much agree that we try to cover too
When designing an online course, it’s important to consider how to create learning experiences that will spark learners’ intrinsic motivation. While different learners may be motivated by different factors, there are several models that can provide useful guidance when you’re designing motivating learning experiences. Two
Imagine a colleague insisting that his students memorize the URLs of the top 20 websites in his field, as well as keep abreast of any changes in those URLs. Would that make sense? Of course not. Students can find any of those sites through a
Online instructors frequently cite email as the biggest distraction in managing their online course workload. Those obnoxious pop-ups or auditory dings announcing new email might as well be a siren call, pulling online instructors away from the work at hand and into a stormy sea
Students tend to engage with concrete ideas and examples better than they do with abstract concepts. This is why, if you teach a lot of theory, you need to find ways to make your instruction interesting, engaging, and relevant, said Tyler Griffin, assistant professor at
To learn more about how students learn, I conducted a test of a core subject that I teach. It’s titled “The American Experience,” and it’s a required course for juniors and seniors at LaGrange College. I’ve taught the course using in-class presentation of the material
Whole class feedback … you know, when the teacher returns a set of papers or exams and talks to the entire class about its performance, or the debriefing part of an activity where the teacher comments on how students completed the task. I don’t believe
Yesterday I got an email from a faculty member who had just received her spring semester student ratings (yes, in August, but that’s a topic for another post). She’d gotten one of those blistering student comments. “This teacher should not be paid. We had to
I’ve been reading some old issues of The Teaching Professor newsletter and ran across a lovely piece by William Reinsmith on learning moments. He’s writing about those times when students get it, when something turns the lights on and they glow with understanding. It may
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