As a tenured full professor, I’m mostly scheduled for upper division and graduate courses. However, last year I taught two classes of traditional aged, first-year students. It was a good learning experience and provided me with new insights about beginning college students.
Individual courses and degree programs give us the opportunity to move students along a developmental continuum. Content complexity grows across course sequences, as does student understanding of it. But are students growing as learners in the same way? Are we designing learning experiences so that
Nothing works quite as well as a good question when it comes to getting the intellectual muscles moving. Given the daily demands of most academic positions, there’s not much time that can be devoted to reflection about teaching. But good questions are useful because they
Stephen Brookfield is out with a third edition of The Skillful Teacher. Only a handful of books on teaching make it past the first edition so to be out with a third says something about the caliber of this publication. He notes in the preface
Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don’t, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I’ve completely forgotten that I wish I’d remembered. Case in point…
Clearly we are not always accurate in predicting students’ learning. Of equal concern, though, is the certainty of our belief that students are learning. The roots of these cognitive errors may lie in the common phenomenon of overconfidence bias that social psychologists have written about
10/23/2019—This article now includes an update from the author.
There is nothing quite like a Friday afternoon. The hurry-up pressures of the week come to a halt, and I can catch my breath against the wide open space of a weekend. But Fridays are special
Faculty can learn so much about teaching from each other. The challenge is finding ways to start and sustain conversations between faculty about teaching. This is the story of how journaling became the centerpiece of an unlikely but highly impactful teaching support group involving a
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
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
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