Faculty recruitment is important because it is the first step in the process of developing qualified and engaged faculty. Over-recruiting makes it challenging to fully engage faculty and under-recruiting…
Culturally Responsive Teaching and UDL
January 20, 2020 Gwen Bass, PhD, and Michael Lawrence-Riddell
Creating educational experiences for our students that integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), a philosophy of education that centers students’ cultural backgrounds as essential…
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Purposeful Pauses and Mindful Communication: Good Techniques for Teachers
January 17, 2020 Tena Long Golding, PhD
The life of a faculty member is filled with noisy busyness—planning class sessions, grading, meeting with students, advising, committee work, research, scholarship, and publications. We are consumed by the…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
It’s Been a Privilege: A Series of Successful Teaching Techniques
January 15, 2020 Richard A. Giaquinto, PhD
It’s been a privilege to teach over some two decades, and during that time, I’ve found a series of techniques that were successful in the classroom. Here, I will…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning
UDL and 21st Century Learning
January 13, 2020 Gwen Bass, PhD, and Michael Lawrence-Riddell
Put simply, “people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone” (Mayer, 2005). Multimedia theory posits the idea that people’s brains more effectively integrate new information…
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In Effective Classroom Management
2,700 Minutes: How to Make the Most of Your Office Hours
January 10, 2020 Margaret Walsh PhD.
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student. Even if you have…
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Thomas Pfaff, PhD, is a professor of mathematics at Ithaca College. Pfaff’s primary scholarly work includes incorporating sustainability ideas into mathematics courses, where he maintains a blog on the…
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In Effective Classroom Management
Emergency Takeover: 4 Tips for Taking Over a Course Midway
January 8, 2020 Shari Harding and Kara Wasnewsky
Unexpected circumstances can strike at any time, taking faculty away from their teaching duties before the end of a semester. Often, other faculty to have to step in to…
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Increasingly, instructors at the college level are called upon to create classroom learning experiences that can be characterized using terms like academically rigorous, accessible, differentiated, trauma-sensitive, inclusive, culturally relevant,…
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Using Interviews to Assess and Mentor Students
January 3, 2020 Barbara Morgan Gardner, PhD, and Kenneth L. Alford, PhD
Have you considered adding five-minute student interviews to your teaching tool kit? Before you calculate how long it would take to interview all of your students and dismiss this…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
What’s on Your Bib? Annotated Bibliographies, Changing by Degrees
December 20, 2019 Donna Graham, PhD, and John Bryan, DBA
The purpose of this article is to present an overview of why annotated bibliographies are needed in higher education, especially in doctoral education programs. The necessity for emerging scholars…
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October 21, 2019, was a golden day for those interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Somehow, across a variety of teaching and learning platforms, several educators…
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Kicking the Paint Bucket Down the Road: Checking in with Our Learners
December 16, 2019 David Largent
Decades ago, a new employee was hired to paint stripes on the side and middle of a road. This was before automated machines, and thus the stripes were painted…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
To Be a Truly Effective Teacher: Learn Something that is Difficult for You
December 13, 2019 Susan McDowall, PhD
I have been teaching various levels of reading skills and composition to native and non-native speakers, to immigrants and U.S. citizens, to people with talent and interest, and I…
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Michelle Pautz, PhD, is an assistant provost for the Common Academic Program and professor of Political Science at the University of Dayton. She shares that being patient with yourself…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning, Online Education
Engaged Gazes: Principles that Online and Flipped Teaching Can Learn From Themed Museum Exhibits
December 11, 2019 Kevin Yee
Online instructors have known for some time that the primary work of creating an online course consists of “curation,” which is usually understood to be a matter of selecting…
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Lecturing is one of the most traditional methods of teaching in higher education. On any given day, there are hundreds of lectures being delivered in classrooms across college campuses. …
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We live in a time of never-before held access to information, which means educators must compete with a wide-ranging array of media for the finite attention of their students’…
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In Course Design, Educational Assessment
Course Design: Aligning Learning Expectations, Instruction, and Assessment
December 2, 2019 Howard Kimmel, PhD
I found the article, “Testing and Assessment: Looking in the Wrong Places” by Dr. Caristi (Faculty Focus, 11 Sept. 2019) interesting. But, if I am interpreting his arguments correctly,…
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A Look Inside the Teaching Professor Collections
November 29, 2019 Maryellen Weimer, PhD
Most of us teaching at the college level like to read. We read professional materials, and we read for pleasure. We know firsthand that much about teaching can be…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning
Implementing Active Learning and Student-Centered Pedagogy in Large Classes
November 27, 2019 Nisha Malhotra, PhD
There is a vast pedagogical literature spelling out the benefits of student engagement and active participation (1). A recent meta-analysis study of 225 active learning classes further concludes that…
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Developing Collaborative Skills through Pedagogical Example
November 25, 2019 Robert S. Fleming, PhD
Regardless of one’s academic discipline or the courses that we teach, college faculty members share a responsibility to prepare our students for success in our courses and academic programs,…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
The Best Ways to Inspire Your Students to Learn Science
November 22, 2019 Alison Rogers
Isaac Newton first conceptualized the idea of gravity when an apple fell on his head. This moment was simple, but inspirational—with a huge impact on scientific progress to come.…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning
Going Multimodal: 5 Tips for Making the Switch to Multimodal Assignments
November 20, 2019 Christian Aguiar
With written communication becoming increasingly multimodal—from newspaper websites to your social media feed to your learning management system’s announcements page—researchers and practitioners alike have made the case for the…
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Designing a Course with Accountability and Dale’s Cone of Experience
November 19, 2019 Dimple J. Martin, PhD
When I began designing my course activities, I needed a model that would include all modalities of the learning processes. As my blueprint, I chose to incorporate Dale’s Cone…
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Scaffolding: How the Chicken Who Crossed the Road Developed New Knowledge
November 18, 2019 Kristin Ritchey
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide. As experts in…
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Instructional Design: Who’s Playing First in My Course?
November 15, 2019 Bob Eierman
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…
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In Effective Classroom Management
Supporting Learning in Students with Autism: What Do Professors Need to Know?
November 13, 2019 Siva priya Santhanam, PhD
“Jason is a bright, ambitious, and warm 22-year-old. He wants to be a Geologist. However, Jason has a hard time staying focused in a large classroom. Group activities, competing…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
A Practical Strategy for Infusing Multicultural Content into Any Lesson
November 11, 2019 David St. Germain, EdD
The important role professors play in helping our students appreciate cultural diversity cannot be overvalued. There has been much written about what a Culturally Responsive educator can do to…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning
Would They Play? Would They Learn?
November 8, 2019 Suzanne C. Shaffer
What began as a routine summer workshop on incorporating games and game-like elements into instruction, turned into a surprise for summer; two weeks of fun and intense online game-play…
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Although Kathleen Koenig was terrified of public speaking as a student, she now teaches lecture classes with 135+ students. As an associate professor in the Physics Department at the…
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Students from different walks of life converge in a classroom for learning. They have different capabilities and personalities, adding to the diversity that comes with learning institutions. As such,…
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In Effective Classroom Management
Easy to Implement Strategies for Disabilities in the College Classroom
November 4, 2019 Sara Schley, EdD
The teaching process not only involves content knowledge, but also an understanding of teaching and learning principles with insights about different learning needs (note: not the same thing as…
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Don’t I Know You from Somewhere? This whole thing started when I played two video games, one after the other, that I imagine almost no one plays in sequence.…
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A College Scare: Traditions and Stories of Halloween Past
October 30, 2019 Tierney King
It’s that time of year when spooky stories emerge and haunted traditions appear! From ghost stories to pumpkin-carving competitions, we found a few colleges and professors who have made…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies
Increase Student Learning in Only 3 Seconds
October 28, 2019 Jennifer Sullivan
I credit my husband as the inspiration for this article. He is a writing professor who is exceptionally good at waiting. He has a unique ability (and probably disturbing…
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Instructional designers can help with many different course-based problems and challenges, including helping you figure out where and how to start with your course design. When a course is…
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In Effective Classroom Management
The Lack of Student Attendance: Feed Them Carrots, They Will Come
October 23, 2019 Dimple J. Martin, PhD
As a professor who just completed their first academic school year, I was naïve to believe that students regularly attended class. As college students, I thought they would demonstrate…
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Years ago, when I began my full-time teaching career in the university classroom, I was a mere 27 years old and fresh out of a PhD program. I did…
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The Past Meets the Future: How to Bring Confucian Virtues into Higher Ed with Educational Technology
October 18, 2019 Melissa Brevetti, PhD, and James Yang, PhD
On August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web became public to the world and forever changed the way that ideas move. Although in-person dialogues and interactions are historically significant ways…