Like birthdays, anniversaries are occasions for reflection, and as I approach the fifth anniversary of my teaching career, I find that my thoughts are drawn to the things that I did badly. Here’s a list of five teaching mistakes I have made. I share them
Graham Broad’s piece reminded me of a short critique John Kenneth Galbraith did of his teaching: “How I Could Have Done Much Better.” The honesty of both is courageous and refreshing. Most of us were trained as content experts. We learned to teach by doing
Learning takes place when students solve problems beyond their current developmental level. Often peer support is needed for the student to get over the hurdles to accomplish a task (DePew & Holt, 2018; Schell, 2016; Vygotsky, 1978). Peer assessment is one means of support that
Have you ever struggled to get students to do required readings? Do your students treat them as optional? Perhaps they do the readings, but when you ask them to engage in critical discussion or think deeply about the material, they are unable to do so.
When students learn there will be group work in a course, they often let up a collective groan. Group work tends to leave a bad taste in students’ mouths due to their lack of understanding of group dynamics. If you plan to use group activities
Thirty-six percent. That’s how much of their grade students believe should be based on effort (Altman et al., 2019). They said 38 percent in one previous survey (Adams, 2005) and 40 percent in another (Zinn et al., 2011). That was more than double the faculty
What would a diverse group of people say if asked, “When you hear the word _________ (fill in the name of your field), what do you think it means?”
A new study in Active Learning in Higher Education (see reference below) motivated me to take another look at the research on student self-assessment. It’s decidedly mixed, which isn’t unexpected given the range of self-assessment tasks used in the research, not to mention cohort and
Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s book The Spark of Learning (2016) teaches how student control and value is central to learning. Control-value theory was first conceptualized by Pekrun (2006), who defined it as being “based on the premise that appraisals of control and values are central to
The research is clear: students can learn from and with each other in groups. But that learning is not the automatic, inevitable outcome of small group interactions. Dysfunctional group dynamics, such as free riding, leadership problems, poor time management, and unaddressed conflict frequently compromise learning
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