Thirty years later, I still remember the first time I went through a stack of student essays in preparation for paper conferences the next day. I was a first-year grad student in a writing program and completely responsible for the learning of the 22 first-year
Last September, we issued a call for information on handouts—how do you use them, how well do they work, what learning goals are they especially well-suited to accomplish? As with previous calls, you responded with an array of examples, advice, insights, and opinions. What’s clear
In recent years, student dropout rates in STEM programs have received a lot of attention. The problem is often referred as the leaky pipeline, and that is a harmful metaphor. It implies that we can “plug the holes” (Cannady et al., 2014), or worse, that
Financial experts have long known that various “nudges”—techniques and policies that influence people while still leaving them with freedom of choice—can induce people to save more of their income. One such technique uses visualization: technology can create imagined images or avatars of our older selves,
Higher education tends to bow down to Bloom as the oracle of educational objectives. Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, which ranks types of learning on six levels from “lowest” (remembering) to “highest” (creating), is a standard guide that almost all academic committees use in reviewing course proposals.
A few years ago, educator Chris Emdin came to our community college campus to give an opening-of-school lecture to faculty. As the author and champion of what he calls “reality pedagogy,” Emdin delivered a passionate, energetic call to faculty to reimagine their teaching as an
Now that many of us have moved to a hybrid or online format, the conversation around student-to-content and student-to-student engagement has taken on a new level of significance and intention. We have developed a reading graphic organizer (RGO) that increases students’ reading comprehension, assesses their
Pete Burkholder recently published an interesting article in this newsletter questioning the widespread push in higher education for “engaging” student activities. He first adopts Jose Eos Trinidad et al.’s (2020) definition of engagement as “enjoyment” and then notes that student enjoyment does not automatically mean
Too often, faculty make content coverage the focus of lesson planning. They plan their courses around the topics they need to cover, which usually leads to them motoring through information that their students are supposed to write down and retain. When students do not retain
Much of the discussion about the move to remote and online classes this school year has focused on the mechanics of such teaching—how to make online learning engaging, how to create community, how to use the technology better. But what about the substance of what
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