Teaching first-semester students has its own special challenges. The students all start out optimistic, but soon, many start making poor decisions such as skipping class, not doing the reading, not participating or even paying attention, and missing small and not-so-small assignments. […]
Are you among the thousands of professors being thrust into student success or retention duties and are still trying to learn the nomenclature? This 25-question quiz helps with some of the basic definitions and serves as a tool that can jumpstart campus discussions. […]
It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people using Web 2.0 applications were Millennials and other early adopters. Today Web 2.0 tools are
Unlike their college-level counterparts, those who teach at the K-12 level spend a significant portion of their education studying the “how” of teaching. What they learn can be invaluable to college professors who enter classrooms with vast content knowledge but little (or no) background in teaching and learning. As those who teach these teachers, we’d like to showcase five teaching strategies college professors can learn from those who teach younger students. […]
Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?
This particular list of characteristics appears in an excellent book that is all but unknown in the states, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, by noted scholar Paul Ramsden. In the case of what makes teaching effective, he writes, “…a great deal is known about the characteristics of effective university teaching. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter; there is no indication of one ‘best way,’ but our understanding of its essential nature is both broad and deep.” (p. 88–89). He organizes that essential knowledge into these six principles, unique for the way he relates them to students’ experiences.
This learning by doing is an excellent example and extension of Dewey’s Experiential Learning Theory, which suggests that everything occurs in a social environment. Learning is a process that includes knowledge, as facilitated and organized by the instructor, as well as, students’ previous experiences and readiness. As educators, we have a responsibility to provide students…
As this example illustrates, scholarship doesn’t always have to take the form of articles in refereed journals and sometimes when the scholarship is pedagogical, other
Learning communities, an approach to curriculum design that links two or more courses, can improve student success and retention and help students develop effective learning
A large study of students enrolled in geography courses at multiple universities in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States looked at
