Time Management Strategies for Academic Leaders

About three years ago, having served four years as department chair and having gone through the typical headaches that people in my position go through, I began studying and practicing time management techniques. After adopting some simple strategies, I find that the job I do today is much more effective and enjoyable than when I began my current leadership position. In this article I will share some key time management principles that you can implement on your own.

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Teaching Strategies for Transformative Learning

Questions are one of those mainstay teaching strategies used to accomplish all kinds of learning goals: questions help an instructor gauge levels of understanding; questions can pique flagging interest; questions lead the way deeper into content and questions challenge thinking. Adult educator Patricia Cranton identifies three kinds of questions especially effective at promoting critical self-reflection and self-knowledge.

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Should Instructors Provide Students with Complete Notes?

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?

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Effective Teaching: Six Keys to Success

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.

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The Wizard of Oz: A Metaphor for Teaching Excellence

When reflecting on my experiences as a college professor, several themes from The Wizard of Oz often surface. This well-known story provides a metaphorical view of behaviors that I strive to achieve in my ongoing work with students. In the familiar foursome’s journey to the Emerald City, I see characteristics necessary for teaching excellence—the need to improve, fine-tune and revamp as we travel with students through courses and curricula.

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Telling, Doing, Making Mistakes, and Learning

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...

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Chapter Essays as a Teaching Tool

A few years ago I added a simple assignment to my introductory sociology classes, and it has paid off in more ways than I expected. Each student writes an essay for each chapter we cover. In the essay, prepared outside of class, the student identifies what they consider the single most important concept from the chapter unit (anything in the textbook or class lecture and discussion) and then explains why they think it is important. Each student must give an example from their own life experiences that illustrates the idea and establishes its importance, and then relate it to the topic.

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The Power of Putting the Students at the Center of Learning

As an instructor at a career-focused university, I thought I had experienced it all: great classes and bad classes, classes that ran smoothly and those that required firm management, classes that were a breeze and those that challenged my patience. Despite these experiences, I was unprepared for what became my best class, the one that most changed my outlook on teaching...

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Instructional Design: Who’s Playing First in My Course?

At a symposium about teaching projects on our campus, one group of faculty presented a set of projects they had done that involved giving students control over course design issues. The projects had grown out of a reading group that studied When Students Have Power by Ira Shor. The faculty presenters said that they let students design the syllabus and that the students typically created a rigorous course that was enhanced by the student ownership. I think I’m a student- and learning-centered teacher, but I’m also a teacher who has determined essentially all the course structure. So a few days before classes started, I decided NOT to spend my last few hours before the opening of the semester organizing, selecting, and deciding on syllabus issues, but to step (off a cliff?) into a world where students have power. Would chaos ensue if I gave students power in my general chemistry class?

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