Humor has a place in education. College teachers can use it to create a welcoming classroom environment, increase learning, improve attendance, and reduce test anxiety (Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez, & Liu, 2010). Such results should encourage all who teach to explore how to integrate humor into
Students can learn from and with each other in groups; that’s been well-established in the research. But student learning in groups doesn’t happen automatically, and it doesn’t happen regularly unless the group activity is carefully designed. The areas listed below identify the essential components of
We all want students to come to class prepared, having done the readings, and ready to actively participate in discussions and activities. Although the practice is debated, many of us use participation grades to encourage the types of behavior we want to see in class.
I give students in my literature courses a lot of weird assignments: I have them make and post films about why people should read Dickens. I tell them these films should show careful analysis of the text but should also entertain and have good music
Critical thinking has become a catch-all phrase in any education literature that touts the development of 21st century learning. It seems that no matter which instructional model is being used or how the craft of teaching is being applied, as long as the approach claims
Many, if not most, college students work part- or full-time jobs while going to school. They often find it difficult to be at a specific place at a specific time a number of times a week to attend their courses, and as a result often
In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft famously declares that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” It’s the experience of this sort of fear that
Call me crazy, but undergraduate courses should be qualitatively different from their high school antecedents. One key change? At the college level, students should be moving toward understanding things instead of just knowing them. How can we introduce and reinforce the difference?
In our polarized political climate, fuelled by dissension, misinformation, and echo chambers, there is no shortage of contentious issues. By “contentious,” we use Zimmerman and Robertson’s (2017) definition: an issue is contentious if it is (1) debatable and inconclusive among experts and (2) deeply important
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
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