Posts Tagged ‘teaching tips’
November 14 - Getting Answer-Oriented Students to Focus on the Questions
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Are your students too answer oriented? Are they pretty much convinced that there’s a right answer to every question asked in class? When preparing for exams, do they focus on memorizing answers, often without thinking about the questions?
To cultivate interest in questions, consider having students write exam questions. Could this be a way to help teachers generate new test questions? Don’t count on it. Writing good test questions — ones that make students think, ones that really ascertain whether they understand the material — is hard work. Given that many students are not particularly strong writers to begin with, they won’t write good test questions automatically. In fact, you probably shouldn’t try the strategy if you aren’t willing to devote some time to developing test writing skills.
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.
October 3 - When Teaching Grows Tired: A Wake-up Call for Faculty
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Bea Easton, the adjunct English teacher in Glen Chamberlain’s short story, “Conjugations of the Verb ‘To Be’,” is doing a crossword puzzle instead of grading English essays. She hasn’t touched the stack of papers since she read the first page of Staci Cook’s composition in which definitely is spelled defiantly and points are emphasized by using really twice.
September 13 - Journey of Joy: Teaching Tips for Reflection, Rejuvenation and Renewal
By: Mary Bart in Free Reports, Teaching & Learning
Part memoir and part advice for others, Journey of Joy: Teaching Tips for Reflection, Rejuvenation and Renewal will encourage and inspire faculty who may have fallen out of love with teaching. It’s loaded with strategies to keep your teaching fresh and invigorated.
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.
August 27 - This Isn’t High School: Advice for Faculty Teaching First-Year Students
By: Mary Bart in Effective Teaching Strategies
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. It’s week 12 of a 15-week-semester and a student shows up during office hours asking, begging, for some way that he can raise his grade. He needs a B, he says, or he could lose his scholarship.
July 30 - Three Steps to Better Course Evaluations
By: Mary Clement, EdD. in Faculty Evaluation
With each semester’s end comes the often-dreaded course evaluation process. Will the students be gentle and offer constructive criticism, or will their comments be harsh and punitive? What do students really want out of a course, anyway? A better time to think about course evaluations is at the beginning of the semester. At that point, an instructor can be proactive in three areas that I have found lead to better course evaluations.
January 20 - Enhancing Out-of-Class Communication: Students’ Top 10 Suggestions
By: Bonnie Farley-Lucas, PhD, and Margaret Sargent, PhD in Philosophy of Teaching
Out-of-class communication makes student-teacher relationships more personal and contributes to student learning. It is also the wellspring for continued academic exchange and mentoring. Unfortunately, electronic consultations via email have diminished the use of in-person office hours. Although students and faculty favor email contact because it’s so efficient, interpersonal exchanges still play an important role in the learning process—much research verifies this. As teachers we have a responsibility to encourage, indeed entice, our students to meet with us face-to-face.
September 23 - Student Engagement Tip: Give Each Lesson its Own Theme Song
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
The challenge of engaging students in a large, introductory political science course, motivated Christopher Soper [article referenced below] to start exploring whether music might help him better connect students and course content. He now opens every class session with a song, and selecting those songs is part of an extra-credit assignment in the course.
September 7 - Five Strategies to Engage Today’s Students
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Explore the culture of Millennial learners, and see how it affects student engagement and learning. You’ll discover what learning environments work best, explore assignment strategies that boost relevance and hear how Millennial learners describe the ideal professor.
