“Why does my edition of Hamlet read ‘O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,’” my student Jake asked me, “but yours has ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt’?”
You’ve prepared a fabulous, interactive class. You’ve designed engaging activities, developed meaningful discussion questions, and cultivated an inviting atmosphere for dialogue. You ask a wonderful open-ended question, anticipating a flurry of discussion and critical thinking—only to be met with silence. Your students stare back at
Would it be weird for someone to listen to graduation speeches while she commuted, cleaned, or walked her goldendoodle? To regularly read transcripts of them, just for fun? Or to play her favorites so many times, she could almost recite them from memory?
I’m a
If you have ever taught (or taken) an online class, you may have fallen into the trap of boring online discussions. You know what I am talking about. These are the kind of discussions where students do the bare minimum. You can tell that they’re
“Are those handouts for us?” my student asked, gesturing toward the copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 that I’d carried into class. “Nope,” I replied. “They’re for the Brit lit class that I teach after yours.” “Oh, OK.” he said, disappointedly.
Current global events, including a rise in nationalistic rhetoric, have put pressure on faculty from all disciplines to be able to facilitate discussions without disenfranchising or excluding any students. I’ve been teaching discussion-based courses for 25 years, and my own methods have evolved and grown,
The ubiquitous cell phone and laptop have made student chat a common part of live classes, much to the consternation of instructors. Not only does it distract the teacher, but studies prove the common-sense intuition that distractions undermine learning (Blasiman et al., 2018). But a
Like so many other professors, I’ve noticed that student engagement is lower now than it was even five years ago. Students are skipping class, skipping assignments, and getting AI to do their reading and writing for them in ever-increasing numbers. When I sign in to
Artificial intelligence is quickly integrating itself into all parts of learning as a tool for both students and faculty. Now it is coming to online discussion in the form of Packback, a tool that integrates into the learning management system
Social annotation tools allow instructors to post a reading to a website and then have students tag it with comments. These provide many benefits for students and instructors. One, they can demonstrate to the instructor that students are reading an article, especially if the
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