September 18, 2020 Flower Darby
Online classes, by their very nature as distance learning experiences, present barriers to student engagement and learning. These barriers are a primary reason that we see low student engagement…
In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
September 16, 2020 Darina M. Slattery, PhD
The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning…
In Effective Classroom Management
September 14, 2020 T. Scott Bledsoe, PsyD, and Kimberly A. Setterlund, MSW, LCSW
When I think about diversity here in college, I can hear myself saying “What if? What if I could go back and talk to my undergrad professors and my…
In Effective Classroom Management
September 11, 2020 Amy B. Mulnix, PhD
You’re committed to equity and inclusion. You’ve been educating yourself about how higher ed systemically and systematically privileges some and disadvantages others, while working to create a just and…
Instructors often experience problems between the directions given for an assignment and the work submitted by a student. Students miss important parts of questions; they may fail to understand…
In Effective Classroom Management
September 7, 2020 Carmen Noel Eichman-Dorr
I teach research-based Composition II courses every semester. My students learn information literacy, look up academic, peer-reviewed journals, create and correctly structure works cited pages, annotate bibliographies, learn rhetorical…
September 4, 2020 Neria Sebastien, EdD
When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic…
September 2, 2020 Rachel J. Ebner, PhD
Due to the pandemic, both instructors and students have had to adapt quickly to different forms of online learning models. Asynchronous learning has emerged as a predominant model because…
In Effective Classroom Management
August 31, 2020 Meena Singhal and Sudeepa Gulati
Being culturally responsive is a critical and necessary feature of our interactions with one another. It is also vitally important in the context of education. Culturally responsive teaching is…
August 28, 2020 Irina Chernikova
Declining numbers of traditional-age high school graduates, changing student demographics, pandemic unpredictability, and struggles with student retention are creating what can be termed a “perfect storm” in higher education.…
In Effective Teaching Strategies
August 26, 2020 David Adams, PhD, and Enoch Hale, PhD
Higher education has recently changed in faster and more dynamic ways than anticipated. COVID-19 is an immediate factor, but the access to information is more prevalent now than 15…
August 24, 2020 Julie Sochacki, JD
When I envision teaching this fall, my highest priorities are social presence and flexibility. No matter the outcome of the fall 2020 semester, my goal is for students to…
August 21, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD, and Taylor Lowe, BA
In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s guide to student engagement, Cavanagh (2019) emphasizes the importance of connecting course content to the emotional lives of students. Bundick, et al. (2014)…
August 19, 2020 Jeremiah E. Shipp, EdD
The global pandemic sent higher education institutions into a whirlwind as many faculty members scrambled to make the rapid transition from traditional to online courses. However, COVID-19 revealed the…
I was in the middle of conducting a research study, examining my own teaching of implementing fun and play into learning, when COVID-19 hit, and we were forced to…
August 14, 2020 Tracey-Ann Carter, PhD, and Toni SimsMuhammad, DAH
It is safe to say that online instruction may become to the traditional classroom what the telescope is to the naked eye. The future of higher education institutions will…
In Effective Teaching Strategies
August 12, 2020 Linnea Lyding, EdD
I once started a speech performing the motions for Itsy Bitsy Spider, and one-by-one, the business men and women joined in, first with the motions and then with the…
August 10, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD
During a recent online class, a student posted in the chat, “We should use breakout groups in all courses.” On the other hand, a faculty director bemoaned receiving student…
**Editor’s Note: This is a recent article from The Teaching Professor. If you are interested in similar articles, check out The Teaching Professor membership.** Most higher education institutions have…
Creating a vibrant community is always on my mind, so the very first thing I do on the first day of class is pass around a tray of cookies…
August 3, 2020 Devshikha Bose, PhD, and Serena Hicks, PhD
In spring 2020 the world faced an unprecedented emergency situation in the COVID-19 pandemic. Many instructors who normally teach face-to-face had to pivot overnight to teach remotely. There was…
July 31, 2020 Susan Swayze, PhD and Rick Jakeman, EdD
The discussion forum plays a central role in our online graduate-level, advanced research methods course, providing opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge and connect and learn with each other…
July 29, 2020 Ann Wheeler and Jörg Waltje
Let’s come right out with it: Reflecting about learning is a commendable practice that should be embedded into any learning experience! For both teachers and students, reflecting is an…
July 27, 2020 Andrew St. James and Darlene Campbell, PhD
“No combination of words can put together the feeling of relief, comfort and gratitude I have towards your course and your fantastic TAs.” –Student comment, Spring 2020 As universities…
In Course Design, Effective Teaching Strategies
July 24, 2020 Fiona Hunt, MLIS
Have you ever struggled to get students to do required readings? Do your students treat them as optional? Perhaps they do the readings, but when you ask them to…
I said to myself in spring of 2019, after reading through the final papers for a class, “I cannot read another history research paper.” I was done. While some…
In Effective Teaching Strategies
July 20, 2020 Laura Schisler, PhD
What can you implement in your classes that can review content, establish a foundation for the day’s topic, encourage student participation, and get students prepared for the day’s activities?…
In Effective Teaching Strategies
July 17, 2020 Tierney King
A song of the day. Dungeons & Dragons. Foldable, flap notes. Plickers. This is only a glimpse of the tactics the 2020 Teaching Professor Virtual Conference covers. Here, I…
“Okay, anyone have any questions? . . . No? Then let’s do it with the music. We’ll start the combination to the right.” The instructor, Julie, ducked off camera…
Connecting with students is one of the most rewarding aspects of a professor’s job. Some faculty hesitate to teach online, frequently offering the rationale: “I want to connect with…
“What are we supposed to be doing?” (said every student at least once in a breakout room). Small groupwork enables students to “compare their current understandings with those of…
July 8, 2020 Diana Jacobs, PhD, and Trisha Prunty
Many years after graduating with our undergraduate degrees, we can still remember the stress of being a student. One lesson that stands out from those years: if a student…
Last spring, my college, like so many other schools, made a dramatic mid-semester pivot from face-to-face instruction to online classes. It was trial by fire for instructors and students…
You just submitted grades and you’re getting ready to teach again. You remember how your classes went, but each time you start planning, you wonder what your students thought…
On Friday, March 13th, I received the email. In response to the rising coronavirus pandemic, we were moving to one week of online instruction. Five days later, one week…
In Course Design, Online Education
June 29, 2020 Kristen Bailey, Thomas Bullington, and Luke MacIver
Dr_Tom 🎲 Dungeon Master (DM): Not every DM plays the villain. That’s not my style. I prefer to hover the party, telling the story, urging the student-adventurers onward. One…
In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
June 26, 2020 Brad Garner, PhD
In our 24/7, always-connected world where we are inundated with information from all sides, the ability to identify quality resources to inform our research and actions has become a…
June 24, 2020 Abdullah Al-Bahrani, PhD, and Rebecca Moryl, PhD
COVID-19 has upended normal social connections that develop between students and professors. We are missing the connections that develop through casual interactions in office hours, pre-class discussions, post-class questions,…
June 22, 2020 Valencia Gabay, MEd, and Shannon Voyles, EdD
It is becoming increasingly important for universities to meet the needs of today’s global learners. As a result, online academic institutions are raising the bar on instructional practices and…
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” This quote, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is often used in gifted education to justify the attention, resources,…
