Preparing one of the plenary sessions for the recent Teaching Professor Conference provided me the opportunity to do some more work on questions, which if you’re a regular reader of this blog you will recognize as an ongoing interest of mine for more than a
Someone sought me out recently to say that she’d tried something I had recommended and it didn’t work. “You need to stop recommending that to people,” she told me. “How many times did you try it?” I asked. “Once and the students hated it,” she
As college faculty, we put tremendous pressure on ourselves to talk. We want to cover the course content and thoroughly explain our assignments. We want to sound smart, share what we know, and communicate convincingly about the work of our disciplines. Our students assume we
Looking for an intervention that improves team functioning on group projects? Consider team charters. “A team charter is introduced to team members upon formation and provides the team the opportunity to discuss and, ultimately, agree on members’ expectations related to behavior, meeting management and the
Most faculty now recognize the importance of students being able to direct their own learning. It’s what positions them for a lifetime of learning. And most faculty also recognize that many of our students are more dependent than self-directed. They want the teacher to make
There is no question that self-regulation of learning is more essential in online than in face-to-face courses. In online courses, students cannot depend on having a teacher physically there to answer their questions and keep them on track. Online students are more responsible for planning
The article cited below describes an assignment in an upper-division, large-lecture biochemistry course that has students generate questions about the readings. The assignment is worth about 5 percent of the course grade. The goal was to develop a formative assessment strategy that “would successfully (1)
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is guided by three key principles: providing multiple means of representation, the “what” of learning; providing multiple means of action and expression, the “how” of learning; and providing multiple means of engagement, the “why” of learning. We would like to
The end of a long academic year is probably the time when we are most open to the idea of a rejuvenating instructional experience. In a recent workshop, I heard two teachers describe just such an experience. They team-taught an introductory English lit course with
Peer assessment in groups has been shown to effectively address a number of group process issues, but only if the peer assessment has a formative component. Many studies have shown that if peer assessment is used at the end of a group project, group members
