Every year I teach a compulsory first-year course on the basics of psychology, which includes an introduction to developmental psychology. Lately I have also been teaching a follow-up elective course on child development. When I discovered that many of the students in the elective had
As new courses begin, there’s another batch of students and lots of new names to learn. A few among us manage to learn names with, what appears to rest of us, considerable ease. Others have developed surefire methods that work for them but not anyone
Most online instructors fall back on tried-and-true writing assignments and the LMS discussion forum to facilitate student engagement with material. But papers do not provide the opportunity for students to engage with other students on their ideas, and discussion forums track the conversation into pre-established
When our teaching focuses entirely on learning outcomes, we can become narrowly focused on seeing our students as skillsets. This can lead us to break learning into smaller and smaller parts so that we can successfully measure student “success.” But if, as Palmer emphasizes, we
We start new courses with a raft of good intentions, especially when they begin during this season of resolutions. We aspire to have assignments graded promptly, learn students’ names quickly, wait patiently for answers, try that new group activity, and practice patience when students are
Faculty tend to lament that student evaluations are just opportunities for students with bad grades to hammer their instructor. But I always believed that student surveys where actually designed to inflate approval ratings. They always start by asking simple class format questions, such as “Did
We’re interested in assignments. To us, they seem like a vital aspect of instruction that goes largely unexamined. What sparked our interest was the way students so often respond to written assignments: “What do you want?” or “I don’t understand what you want in this
One of the luxuries of this online format that we didn’t have when The Teaching Professor was a print publication is the ability to pursue topics more thoroughly, to come at them from different directions, and to assemble collections of resources related to them. We
Fresh from winter break, my students want to test my boundaries—and they should. But even as they challenge me, many of my students will also limit themselves by defining their intelligence and talents as fixed traits. Each semester I hear the familiar refrains: “I’m not
The rise of home-based care created a need for students enrolled in the online RN to BSN nursing program at Penn State World Campus to gain an authentic experience of evaluating a home environment to determine if the setting would be suitable to administer effective
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