Status Update: Changing the Way We Deliver Instruction
All too often I have heard colleagues pondering over situations in which students are found on their smart phones rather than engaged in class. As a former elementary school teacher…
Six Things that Make College Teachers Successful
1. Study the knowledge base of teaching and learning You have chosen to teach in higher education because you are a subject-matter specialist with a tremendous knowledge of your discipline.…
Eureka! An Accumulation of the Best Teaching Advice
The 2019 Annual Teaching Professor Conference offered numerous tactics and strategies to implement in the classroom, but Ken Alford, PhD, Brigham Young University, took a different approach in his session…
Fostering Student Ethical Development as Part of the Curriculum
A state worker fabricates laboratory test results that can lead to false criminal convictions A restaurant inspector disregards health code violations Someone tampers with sports equipment used during a match…
8 Strategies to Encourage Interdependence and Help-Seeking Behavior in College Students
What messages do our students receive from their parents, their high school teachers, their older peers, and siblings before they enter college? When I ask my first-year students the answers…
Rights and Responsibilities for Group Members
I recently revisited something I’ve always considered a great resource. It originally appeared in a 1992 issue of the Teaching Professor and was published then as a Study Group Member’s…
Designing Meaningful and Measurable Outcomes: A First Step in Backwards Design
I’ve sat on the Curriculum Committee at two different higher education institutions. I’ve also participated in college assessment committees and accreditation committees at both the school level and institutional level.…
The Silent Professor
As college faculty, we put tremendous pressure on ourselves to talk. We want to cover the course content and thoroughly explain our assignments. We want to sound smart, share what…
Nursery Rhymes: The Social Equalizer
Faculty are urged to turn classrooms into activity centers where lively discussion serves as an antidote to bored students zoning out of class lectures and zoning into images and words…
5 Surprising Tips for Using Handheld Educational Technologies in Lecture
Recently, I worked with a research assistant to assess the efficacy of the use of smart phones and tablets in lectures. The study involved asking students to use their own…