In the fall of 2013, at the age of 56 I successfully defended my dissertation and shortly thereafter accepted a job at a regional public university where I taught three new classes. My experiences teaching confirm that even at my age, change and movement to
Online instructors frequently cite email as the biggest distraction in managing their online course workload. Those obnoxious pop-ups or auditory dings announcing new email might as well be a siren call, pulling online instructors away from the work at hand and into a stormy sea
Five faculty, all belonging to the same interdisciplinary sociology department, decided that collectively they could improve student writing skills better than they could individually. “Our approach emphasizes that a collective effort need not be a department-wide, institutionalized one. Indeed, faculty can still collaborate and students
A thoroughly referenced article seeks to answer why science faculty members are slow to adopt evidence-based teaching practices, despite what the authors describe as “heroic dissemination” of information on these practices. The folks on the science side of the house have evidence that use of
The end of a long academic year is probably the time when we are most open to the idea of a rejuvenating instructional experience. In a recent workshop, I heard two teachers describe just such an experience. They team-taught an introductory English lit course with
Teaching requires more than just a keen mind; it also demands emotional energy, and that is particularly true for new teachers. But what emotions do they experience? Are those feelings more positive than negative? Are certain emotions associated with particular teaching approaches? These are all
Any instructional practice that is new to you, such as group testing, giving students a role in creating a classroom policy, or getting students involved in assessment, is not just a new activity that requires attention to a new set of implementation details; it’s a
I’ve been delving a bit into the emotional aspects of teaching. They continue to be largely ignored in the research literature and in our discussions of teaching. Could that be because emotional things fit uncomfortably in the objective, rational, intellect-driven culture of the academy? We
In an article billed as a “field guide” to constructivism, three authors from the sciences focuses on cognitive constructivism and aims to equip faculty with what they need in order to determine how constructivist a learning activity is. The authors propose that constructivist activities can
I teach history and geography at a small college in rural Ohio, and like many in my profession, I’ve been watching the development of massive open online courses with some concern, particularly since MOOCs started being absorbed into curricula. In the office-door debates I engage
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