I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student. Even if you have 270, that’s still 10 minutes per student. Recently I’ve been working to make the most of
Behance is a digital portfolio system that is popular among artists. This makes it ideal for visual art students to develop their professional resumes for use after graduation. But portfolios have many uses beyond displaying work for business; they can also be used as teaching
In the very first article I ever wrote for The Teaching Professor, I quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory
We live in a world where information is often conveyed visually through infographics and the like, and while creating those graphics used to be the purview of professionals, Canva puts it within the reach of anyone. The secret is Canva’s template and drag-and-drop editing system.
Online faculty often default to an essay assignment mindset when establishing the parameters for an online discussion. They require posts to be up to 500 words and to include several citations and other academic writing components, such as introductions, conclusions, and references.
Despite the challenges of remote teaching and learning during the pandemic, student surveys in 2021 indicate that students want to continue having the option to learn online. Many instructors are willing to accommodate these students. But colleagues at several institutions are experiencing institutional hesitation, with
As the number of neurodivergent students continues to rise nationwide, the student population filling our classrooms reflects this increase. As college professors we often find ourselves unprepared for the challenges of teaching these students. We might even confuse a student’s disruptive or uncooperative behavior for
Too often, asynchronous online discussions morph into students making only perfunctory postings to fulfill the bare minimum requirements. We blame students, but the deeper issue is that the discussion forum is foreign to students because real conversations aren’t planned. How often have you sat with
Connectedness and relationships are important for students’ learning experiences. But online instructors may be tempted to think it is too challenging to fully engage all of their students. How can instructors whet their students’ appetites and keep them coming back for more? In this article,
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