Vivid memories of a writing professor persist. I credit him with teaching me to write, and by that, I mean he got me seeing the unseen in my writing and recognizing rewriting as more important than writing. I also learned to take and deliver criticism.
Discussing course content with your classmates requires a different kind of conversation than the casual exchanges that occur between students. It’s harder to talk when you don’t know much about the subject when it’s not easily understood. As result, you may find discussions with classmates
How students discuss content in courses continues to be a concern Whether the exchange occurs the classroom, in a group, or online, most of us have heard students making assertions, never mentioning evidence, feeling free to comment when they are unprepared, and mostly agreeing with
Anyone who has used group projects in their teaching knows that they can be a double-edged sword. While they can teach valuable collaboration skills that students will need in their professional and personal lives, they can also falter when students cannot get themselves organized enough
We learn by connecting new information to prior knowledge (Palfreman, 1992). Much of this involves categorizing information according to patterns. Whereas the average American football fan just sees 11 individual defenders on the field, a veteran NFL quarterback sees the formation within the context of
“One of the best ways to be bad at something is to tell yourself that you are bad at it” (Holmes, 2021, p. 293). This applies to students who believe they can’t take tests. “Despite the prevalence of the bad test-taker as part of the
I have long pondered a phrase I learned from a mentor: “Witness the struggle.” Frances, my mentor, used the phrase when she talked about working with students in emotional pain. She was referring to those students who sometimes lash out in frustration over missed assignments,
I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after
The internet is full of people voluntarily sharing information for the benefit of others. It originated as a means for government and academic researchers to share information (The Online Library Learning Center, n.d.), but this sharing really took off with the advent of social media,
In last week’s column, I cautioned that while peer review has many benefits, these aren’t automatic, and there’s also the potential for harm. Here’s a rundown of the challenges that come with the strategy and ways to minimize them. The peer-review activities themselves can be
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