If students don’t come right out and say they don’t want to work in groups, the nonverbal message comes through loud and clear. “Get together with those sitting near you. I’ve got something I want you to work on as a group.” Some students stretch
Students traditionally receive only the course description and textbook list prior to starting a class. Everything else about the course is learned from the syllabus they get on the first day. But some of the information contained in the syllabus might be valuable to students
“All teachers can improve; most should.” Did someone tell me this or did I make it up? I’ll put it in quotes because I’m not sure, but it’s a one-liner I like. To improve means to get better. It’s about ongoing efforts to teach in
Active learning improves student performance and increases enthusiasm for learning. But despite its known benefits, active learning can be challenging to implement for asynchronous online learners. The most popular active learning techniques—such as think-pair-share, audience polling, and game-based learning—center around students working together in a
Has teaching improved? It’s a question I’ve been putting to myself here on the backside of a long career. Without beginning benchmarks it’s hard to say for sure, maybe a bit, but not as much as it could or should. My feelings were reinforced by
We often think of writing as a reflection of finished thinking, whether it be via a term paper, final exam, or other culminating project. However, writing is also a powerful tool for thinking, to help students construct meaning and to deepen their understandings of complex
When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS. Don’t ask me how my students managed to get through them.
Most teachers already spend time regularly reviewing course content. What’s different with these approaches is that they get students doing the reviewing and they do so with activities that model evidence-based exam preparation strategies.
Just in time to thwart any attempts at starting to unwind and enjoy a well-deserved break from another brutal academic year, automated results of the Student Course Satisfaction Surveys (aka evaluations) arrive in my inbox demanding attention.
That’s not going to come as a big surprise. What leaves most of us a bit breathless and depressed are the numbers. The study referenced below cites four other studies in which more than 70 percent of the students reported not doing assigned reading. In
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