TILT 2.0: How to Convey Your Expectations of a Class Assignment Effectively
How are your students doing this semester with their assignments? This is not a trick question, I promise! In my role as a consultant in a teaching center, I have…
A Call to Interrogate Educational Development for Racism and Colonization
It is widely known that as an institution, higher education is laden with historical and structural racism. From the role of slave labor and the forcible taking of Indigenous land…
Teaching the How: Three Ways to Support Failure
This article first appeared in the Teaching Professor on June 3, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. I give students in my literature courses a lot of weird assignments: I have…
You Can’t Pour from an Empty Cup: Nurturing Ourselves to Support our Students
Lalah Delia, writer, teacher, advocate for holistic living and wellbeing, is credited with saying, “Focusing on taking care of yourself and doing the best you can, versus judging yourself, is…
Benefits to Beginning Class with a Visible Agenda
When students first enter your class, whether it be in person or in a virtual setting, what do the students see? Is there anything for them to look at when…
Games as Study Aids
This article first appeared in the Teaching Professor on July 27, 2020. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Studies show that many students do a poor job of studying (Miller, 2017). Quite a few…
The Emotional Variable in Student Learning
“I am just terrible at writing,” she says. “I have always been terrible at writing. I just cannot write well. That is why my grades are terrible.” This remark is…
Course Content and Course Assignments: Considerations to Help with Student Plagiarism
Student plagiarism occurs in different disciplines and in all years of study (Holt, 2012; Wang, 2008). Plagiarism in colleges and universities is concerning (MacLennan, 2018). Cummings et al. (2002) report…
Teaching with Paradox: A Pedagogical Strategy for Thriving in the Pandemic Classroom
As we begin another semester in which pandemic stress activates fight or flight responses, we may ask ourselves, Will we find a way in which our anxieties about teaching and…
Why Am I So Tired? Reflections on Compassion Fatigue
It goes beyond tired, doesn’t it? It feels like exhaustion—physical and psychological. Perhaps you are not sleeping or eating well. Perhaps you have bouts of feeling hopeless, powerless, irritable, angry,…