Posts Tagged ‘Effective Teaching Strategies’
April 4 - ‘What Works’ in the Messy Landscape of Teaching and Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
The title is borrowed from text in an excellent article that challenges our use of the “what works” phrase in relationship to teaching and learning. Biology professor Kimberly Tanner writes, “… trying to determine ‘what works’ is problematic in many ways and belies the fundamental complexities of the teaching and learning process that have been acknowledged by scholars for thousands of years, from Socrates, to Piaget, to more recent authors and researchers.” (p. 329) She proceeds to identify six reasons why the phrase hinders rather than fosters an evidence-based approach to teaching reform (in biology, her field, but these reasons relate to all disciplines). “Language is powerful,” she notes. (p. 329) We use it to frame issues, and when we do, it guides our thinking.
February 20 - Improving Teaching One Class at a Time
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Can we reform teaching and learning throughout higher education one class at a time? I used to think so, but the pace of change has made me less optimistic. I just finished preparing an article for The Teaching Professor newsletter that reports the results of a survey of 744 full- and part-time faculty teaching at eight two-year technical colleges across Georgia. The researchers presented the respondents with a list of 18 instructional strategies and asked them to identify how often they used each one in their last 10 class sessions. Over 90% of the respondents said they lectured for four or more class sessions with more than 50% of those saying they lectured during all 10 class sessions.
January 23 - Six Steps to Making Positive Changes in Your Teaching
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
I’m working my way through a 33-page review of scholarship on instructional change in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines. The authors reviewed an impressive 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles. However, what they found isn’t impressive both in terms of the quality of the scholarship on this topic and in terms of instructional change in general.
November 13 - A New Way to Help Students Learn Course Vocabulary
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich—unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone.
November 7 - Why is it Difficult for Students to Learn the Content in Your Field?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
There’s no hidden agenda here: Asking the question of what makes learning difficult doesn’t imply that the objective is to make the content easy. Material can be so watered down that its basic integrity is compromised. In the same vein, there’s no justification for making material harder than it needs to be, but the right balance between difficult and easy is not the subject of this post.
September 25 - Nine Essential Traits of the Effective Professor
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
This 60-minute seminar will not only tell you what today’s students believe are the most essential qualities for effective teaching, but it will also prepare you to make simple and sometimes subtle changes to incorporate or develop practices and traits that resonate with students. The result? Improved academic outcomes and better course evaluations.
September 13 - Teaching Something You Don’t Like: A Model That Works
By: Veronica T. Rowe in Instructional Design
I am not a history buff and do not enjoy teaching or learning about history in general. So, as an instructor who is required to teach the history of my field, I have had a difficult time finding an interesting way of relaying the information. Needing a new approach, I decided to see if I could adapt the Family Involvement Model. This research-based model found that when family members are involved in the courses of Latino college students, their persistence and success in higher education improves. The model is based on the idea of including family to promote students’ education and as such supports the old premise that you really don’t understand something unless you can convey that knowledge to another person.
July 18 - Do Your Students Understand the Material, or Just Memorize and Forget?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Have you ever heard of Eric Mazur? If you teach physics and are into that discipline’s pedagogical literature, in all likelihood you have. But Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, is someone all of us should know. The reference at the end of the post contains a succinct and compelling introduction to his work.
July 21 - 7 Learner-Centered Principles to Improve Your Teaching
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Most of us are being asked to do more—teach more, assess more, report more, publish more. This seminar will help you use your limited time wisely, because it’s done all the heavy lifting. You’ll not only gain new insights into how students learn but also learn about practical and effective teaching strategies that reflect the latest research.
July 12 - How Do You Engage Your Students? More Tips from Conference Attendees
By: Mary Bart in Effective Teaching Strategies
As we mentioned in the June 28 and July 5 posts, during the opening keynote at The Teaching Professor Conference, Elizabeth F. Barkley, a professor at Foothill College and author of Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2010) presented on a topic she titled Terms of Engagement: Understanding and Promoting Student Engagement
