“I’d do things a lot differently if I just had fewer students.”
Have you ever thought or said this? This sentiment has been voiced to me over and over again by attendees in faculty development workshops and by graduate student instructors I have supervised. Truth
When I visit colleges to facilitate conversations on curricular reform, I always begin my presentations with a quotation from Jerry Gaff, the grandfather of contemporary thinking on general education:
A program for reforming general education should be designed around each institution’s character,
I’m a historian, and I do a fair amount of pedagogical research. But one thing I’m not is a historian of college-level teaching, which makes Jonathan Zimmerman’s recent work, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, such a delight. What follows
Online faculty are often looking for ways to add real-time discussion to their asynchronous courses. But discussions fall flat when only a handful of students participate. I found an activity that solves this problem by combining videoconferencing with group work and a whiteboard in a
Wanted: Faculty excited to partner with other faculty to learn with and from students. Humility, a collaborative spirit, and the ability to handle chaos and dozens of projects simultaneously is essential. Previous experience cheerleading is preferred.
Anyone that uses inquiry-based learning will chuckle at the
Decades of research show the value of instructor presence and student engagement for online learners. Yet many instructors wonder how well their efforts to foster engagement really work, leading some to question the value of discussion and other types of interactions.
As James Boswell, noted biographer of 18-century English man of letters and dictionary author Samuel Johnson, writes in Life of Johnson, “The art of communicating instruction, of whatever kind, is much to be valued” (p. 70). That art, I would add, benefits when teachers wrestle
When my son was growing up, my wife and I bought memberships at the local science museum so we could take him there any time we wanted. Like many parents, we wanted him to grow up in an intellectually stimulating environment. No vacuous video games
While animation used to be the purview of professional studios, today software like Vyond makes it easy for those with no animation skills at all. I design and teach an online college-readiness course that includes a wide variety of engaging content; however, students continue to
There is a well-traveled, perhaps apocryphal, story about Super Bowl–winning former coach Bill Walsh. As he observed his assistants at practice one day, he was horrified by the amount of screaming directed at the players. According to the story, he gathered the coaches together and
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