I decided last spring to implement a new teaching strategy: individual midterm conferences with every student enrolled in my classes. That’s approximately 75 students total. Throughout my years of teaching, I’d heard colleagues report that meeting with students individually during the semester had a positive
Snapchat is a video/photo-sharing app that has become nearly ubiquitous with young people due to a couple of unique features. One, the shared content automatically disappears after a set time. A shared Snap (a single image or video) goes away after being viewed by the
Do you have students who don’t deliver good work? Sometimes it’s a case of not having the necessary skills, but not always. Students with skills have been known to deliver papers that show promise but aren’t well organized, fail to explore interesting ideas deeply, haven’t
Think of the last time you had a masterfully planned class session fall completely flat. If you have been teaching for more than a week, you’ve been there. How did you react? Did you blame the students, the time of day the class meets, or
“The Case for Cold-Calling. . .” I hadn’t finished reading the title before I started thinking, “I need to respond with the case against.” But I read on and changed my mind. The article proposed an approach to cold-calling that mitigated many of the objections
The limitations of traditional online discussion boards are well-known. Yellowdig is an alternative that I have used to simplify grading, encourage student-driven conversations, and engage students so that they consistently participate throughout the semester. With familiar, social media-like features, Yellowdig is an LMS-integrated discussion tool
I recently checked the class rosters for two online courses that I would begin teaching in a couple of weeks and saw that I had 32 students in one and 28 in the other. These numbers may not be considered a lot by some instructors,
In a commentary about to be published in College Teaching, author and teacher Ellen Ballock writes about a set of student papers she found disappointing. I’m guessing that will resonant with most of us. Teachers regularly get work from students that just doesn’t measure up.
In an era of hyper-focus on students’ academic performance, is it possible that schoolwork is actually too easy? I recognize that this might seem a strange question, given how much we hear of stressed-out students, slogging through hours of homework and blizzards of standardized tests.
I am thankful for Jennifer Trainor’s insightful “Assignment Details: What if You Provide Too Many?” She raises what should be a real concern for teaching professors: Am I doing too much for my students? In other words, are teachers compromising student learning when we compose
