By: Reinard Valentine, MEd, and Melissa Brevetti, PhD
Inclusive practices are critical to the higher education landscape in order to improve student learning. Democratic principles are rooted in inclusion, and faculty and staff have a responsibility to provide personal and professional skills so that students fulfill goals of…
The area of Scholarship has been defined in a somewhat narrow sense. This is reflected in an article by Plume and van Weijen (2014), where they noted “publish or perish,” or frequent publication as the more commonly recognized method scholars…
By: Faculty Focus
This week on The Focus is You, we’re learning a bit more about Tracie Addy, PhD, MPhil, Director of the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning & Scholarship at Lafayette College. Previously a full-time faculty, Dr. Addy is now…
I started teaching economics in higher education almost a decade ago, and yet the memory of the first time I asked a student to meet with me to talk about plagiarism is still painful. Rather than resolve anything, in the…
By: Vicki Ingalls
A wise and dear colleague of mine, now retired, once said to me as we walked to class, “I teach for free; they pay me to grade.” I have found in my 22 years of teaching that I concur with…
By: Lynne N. Kennette, PhD, Phoebe S. Lin, PhD, and Lisa R. Van Havermaet, PhD
Many college courses employ multiple choice (MC) tests as a primary means of assessment. Although these are sometimes critiqued (Kaufman, 2001), modifications can be made to this assessment, based in cognitive science, to increase the value of this testing format.…
By: Faculty Focus
To kickstart The Focus is You, a short Q&A that features a different Faculty Focus member every Thursday, we’re featuring Maryellen Weimer, editor of The Teaching Professor and a professor emerita at Penn State Berks. Albeit she told me, “Remember,…
By: Ed Cunliff, PhD
The approach to course reading described here is not the result of some altruistic action to save students money on textbooks. Nor was it a brilliant “Aha!” moment regarding the neuroscience of learning. It was the result of an attempt…
By: Brenda Thomas
Some of the recurring topics on Faculty Focus in the past ten years pertain to handling excuses, extension requests, and late work, because teachers regularly deal with those issues. Suggested remedies range from giving one-time grace to assuming deception as…
By: Candice Dowd Barnes EdD and Patricia Kohler-Evans EdD
Most would agree the classroom is a place for discourse, reflection, and learning. But, whose class is it? Who’s doing the learning—the teacher or the students? We submit it’s both—teacher and students learning from each other. Too often, faculty see…