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Effective Teaching Strategies
Recent Seminars
7 Learner-Centered Principles to Improve Your Teaching
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.
audio Online Seminar • Recorded on Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
How Do You Engage Your Students? More Tips from Conference Attendees
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
23 Practical Strategies to Help New Teachers Thrive
For the new college teacher, it is best to learn from those who have been there. In 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Teachers Thrive, you will learn the tips and techniques that have proven successful for experienced faculty, and explore how they can be used and adapted in your own classes.
Standards and Pedagogies of Student Engagement
A colleague raised a very interesting point in response to the February 17 post on evidence-based teaching. That entry explored some of the reasons instructional practice is not better informed by research findings.
A Lifeline for Those Teaching Large Classes
Simon, who teaches very large economics classes wonders in a blog comment if the kind of facilitative learning described in the March 2 post is possible in mass classes. I’d like to use this post to address his query. First off, as any large course instructor knows, teaching those big, required, introductory courses is not easy. In fact, it may well be the most difficult teaching assignment given to teachers. In my mind this raises a host of intriguing questions about who should be teaching and taking those courses. But that’s a topic for another post.
Four Characteristics of Successful Teachers
The quest to identify the ingredients, components, and qualities of effective instruction has been a long one. Starting in the 1930s, researchers sought to identify the common characteristics of good teachers. Since then, virtually everybody who might have an opinion has been asked, surveyed, or interviewed. Students have been asked at the beginning, middle, and end of their college careers. Alumni have been asked years after graduating. Colleagues within departments and across them have been asked, as have administrators, from local department heads to college presidents.
Helping Students Develop Problem-Solving Skills via Online Discussions
Developing sophisticated but essential learning skills is especially challenging in large classes. That’s why we regularly report on strategies that faculty members have developed and are using in large classes. The cases in point here are three different biochemistry courses in which faculty members have been using online, asynchronous discussion groups to develop problem-solving skills.
Helping Students See Correlation Between Effort and Performance
One of the student engagement techniques described in Elizabeth F. Barkley’s Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty has students predicting and reflecting on their exam preparation and performance. It’s a technique that helps students see the correlation between their efforts and their exam scores, as well as one that helps them assess the effectiveness of the study strategies they use.
A Vision of Students Today, as Told by Students
A Vision of Students Today is a short video created by Michael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and 200 KSU students. Since being uploaded to YouTube in Oct 2007 it’s been viewed more than 4 million times. Even if you’ve already viewed it, it’s worth a second look. It describes some of the most important characteristics of students today, as told from the student perspective.
Things Effective Teachers Do
It’s been a while since I was an undergrad, but I still remember my two favorite professors. They had completely different personalities and teaching styles, they even taught in different departments, but they did some things in very similar ways. I think that’s what made them so effective. It really wasn’t the content — although that was part of it — it was more the classroom experience they created.
