Posts Tagged ‘teaching methods’
June 17 - Student Engagement: Trade-offs and Payoffs
By: E. Shelley Reid in Effective Classroom Management
I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me specifically) undermine our own efforts to engage students.
June 14 - Using MP3s as a Teaching Tool for College English Classes
By: Vicki E. Phillips in Teaching and Learning
My recent foray into using MP3s to teach college level English classes came out of my need to reach more of my non-traditional students. I saw a trend developing where more adults than ever were seeking a college education or even returning to college to change careers, and it only followed that I had a responsibility as an instructor to try and reach these students. It also became apparent in my classroom that I wanted to not only reach, but to retain these non-traditional students who seemed to become easily frustrated with the more traditional lecture and textbook methods.
May 6 - Why Students Cram for Exams
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
It will probably not shock any instructor to learn that students cram for exams. What may be a bit surprising is the percentage of students who do: somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent, depending on the study. In the research reported in the article referenced below, approximately 45 percent of students admitted to cramming.
September 16 - Designing Effective Assessments: Q&A with Trudy Banta
By: Rob Kelly in Educational Assessment
In their new book, Designing Effective Assessment: Principles and Profiles of Good Practice, Trudy Banta, Elizabeth Jones, and Karen Black provide assessment profiles from a wide variety of institutions and units. In advance of her online seminar titled Principles and Profiles of Good Practice in Assessment. Dr. Banta answered questions about the book and some of the topics she will discuss next week’s seminar.
September 28 - What College Professors Can Learn from K-12 Educators about Instructional Design
By: Online Classroom in Instructional Design
Unlike their college-level counterparts, those who teach students from kindergarten through high school (K-12) 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. Regrettably, college teachers often disdain what their K-12 colleagues do and know. As those who teach these teachers, we’d like to showcase some of what college professors can learn from those who teach younger students.
September 19 - A Brain-Friendly Environment for Learning
By: Davie Davis in Instructional Design
Thanks to new technologies of brain imaging and major breakthroughs in cognitive research, neuroscientists now know more about the functioning of the human brain than ever. This new knowledge should help us revolutionize our teaching methods, but what about those of us who can’t tell a hippocampus from a hippopotamus? As an English professor whose gray matter has frequently proved more or less impervious to scientific discourse, I decided to tackle this challenge head-on, so to speak. Here are some of my findings, along with their implications for teaching and learning…
