Recently, in my first-year seminar class, I had an opportunity to re-think my use of group projects. I had set up the task perfectly, or so I thought. I’d…
Group vs. Collaborative Learning: Knowing the Difference Makes a Difference
February 5, 2018 Jane A. Scheuermann
Five years ago, I transitioned from a totally lecture-based classroom to a more student-centered, engaging one. Initially, I found that when students were placed in groups, they didn’t necessarily…
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Helping Students Develop Critical Information Processing Skills
January 29, 2018 Kimberly Chappell, EdD
The wealth of digital information has shifted our focus in higher education from developing critical thinking skills to developing critical information processing skills. Today’s students are digital natives, and…
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The “find and replace” feature in Word quickly makes an old syllabus ready for a new course. Use it too many times and thinking about the course settles into…
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I continue to be a huge fan of personal narratives, those accounts of teaching experiences from which the author and the reader learn much. They’re scholarly, thoughtful, and intellectual.…
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How do students think about assignments? A lot never get past the idea that they’re basically unpleasant things faculty make them do. What does interest a lot of students…
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Inclusion by Design: Tool Helps Faculty Examine Their Teaching Practices
September 18, 2017 Carl S. Moore, PhD, Edward Brantmeir, PhD, and Andreas Brocheild, PhD
Are there barriers to inclusion lurking in your courses? After meeting at a diversity and inclusion session of the 2013 Professional and Organization Development Network (POD Network) Conference in…
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There’s a lot to be gained from considering ideas and arguments at odds with current practice. In higher education, many instructional practices are accepted and replicated with little thought.…
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First Day of Class Activities that Create a Climate for Learning
July 19, 2017 Maryellen Weimer, PhD
There’s no discounting the importance of the first day of class. What happens that day sets the tone for the rest of the course. Outlined below are a few…
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In my corner of the country, we experienced an unusually harsh winter which resulted in many class sessions being canceled due to school closures. Our faculty, and likely other…
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Regardless of our subject area, we’ve all had moments where some students appear to hang on every word, gobbling up our messages, images, graphs, and visuals with robust engagement.…
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The language of our disciplines is complex—it has to be. What we study is specific and detailed, and it needs to be described with language that precisely captures essence…
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College courses, like movies, can inspire, entertain, shock, or repulse. Instructors produce, direct, and star in a series of semester-long scenes, complete with audiences, critics, and awards. If your…
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In Blended and Flipped Learning, Course Design
Using a Flipped Classroom Approach and Just-in-Time Teaching to Engage Students
May 19, 2017 Jason Guzman
Silvia Martins, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology in Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, faced a challenge in her introductory epidemiology course, Principles of Epidemiology.…
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Four Types of Group Work Activities to Engage Students
May 1, 2017 Lynne N. Kennette, PhD, and Wes Hanzuk
Collaboration helps to develop many of the key skills that will be required of students for their future success. Students can develop many of these so-called “soft skills,” or…
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Regardless of the academic program, internships can be a key piece of any student’s academic experience. In my involvement as an internship coordinator for political science, the only assessment…
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One thing about student evaluations that troubles me is how they give students the impression that it’s the teacher who makes or breaks the course. A few instruments query…
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Using Low-Stakes Writing Assignments to Achieve Learning Goals
February 24, 2017 Michael J. LaGier, PhD
During my time as a teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the importance of student learning…
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In Course Design, Teaching with Technology
Extending the Shelf-Life of Your Instructional Videos: Six Common Pitfalls to Avoid
January 16, 2017 Marie Norman, PhD
When instructional video is produced thoughtfully and used to promote active engagement, it can improve student motivation, learning, and performance, make content more memorable, and bring highly visual material…
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Courses That Are Hard, but Not Too Hard: Finding the Sweet Spot
November 9, 2016 Maryellen Weimer, PhD
I have been doing some reading and thinking about hard courses. Courses need to be challenging, but when they become too hard, students stop trying and little learning results.…
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In Course Design, Educational Assessment
Testing What You’re Teaching Without Teaching to the Test
August 8, 2016 Cindy Decker Raynak and Crystal Ramsay, PhD
Have your students ever told you that your tests are too hard? Tricky? Unfair? Many of us have heard these or similar comments. The conundrum is that, in some…
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Consider the lessons we learn without being fully aware they are taking place. Take something simple, such as walking into a new building for the first time. With everyone…
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Prior knowledge is essential for learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and information. But when that prior knowledge is incomplete, confused, or flawed, it can…
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Let’s face it, most faculty were good students and always did well in school. For students, having a professor who is adept at learning can be inspiring. But what…
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We are doing some (late) spring cleaning to the Mentor Commons. Removing the oldest programs as we continue to add new ones. This 20-Minute Mentor is from 2010, so…
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A central goal of education is teaching critical-thinking skills. Inquiry-based teaching is an excellent path to this goal. Based partly on the philosophy that “humans are born inquirers,” the…
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The literature on teaching and learning has improved so much over the years. Researchers are now covering important aspects of both in depth, analyzing with creative designs and exploring…
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Blogging can be a tool that aids learning. “Blogs provide students with an opportunity to ‘learn by doing’ to make meaning through interaction with the online environment.” (p. 398)…
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Now here’s an argument I haven’t heard before: Improving your instruction makes it easier for students to learn. If it’s easier for them to learn, they won’t work as…
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Effort and habit are instrumental to learning and writing, but they are often dimly lit in our grading systems. That light needs to brighten with the help of new…
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Goldilocks and the ‘Just Right’ Strategy for Helping Students Acquire New Content
January 15, 2016 Karen S. Buchanan, EdD
When Goldilocks visits the three bears’ house, she tastes the porridge they left out in the kitchen; papa’s porridge is too hot, mama’s is too cold, but baby bear’s…
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In our role as instructors, most of us deal with the problem of too much content. We often embrace a “content coverage” model in designing our courses, in which…
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Built-in Self-Assessment: A Case for Annotation
December 7, 2015 Karen Sheriff LeVan and Marissa E. King
we want students to be critical thinkers, we must routinely and explicitly give them structured practice opportunities to critically examine their own thinking. Squeezing two or three metacognitive activities…
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Problem-Based Learning: Six Steps to Design, Implement, and Assess
November 30, 2015 Vincent R. Genareo PhD and Renee Lyons
Twenty-first century skills necessitate the implementation of instruction that allows students to apply course content, take ownership of their learning, use technology meaningfully, and collaborate. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is…
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A quote from my June 3 blog post appeared in the October 18 issue of the New York Times. I was thrilled until I read the beautifully written op-ed…
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Peer Assessment that Improves Performance in Groups
October 29, 2015 Maryellen Weimer, PhD
Peer assessment in groups has been shown to effectively address a number of group process issues, but only if the peer assessment has a formative component. Many studies have…
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See if this sounds familiar. You’re scheduled to teach a course you have taught before that desperately needs revision. The content and pedagogy go back for a decade or…
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Ah-ha Moments—When Cooperative Learning in the Classroom Works
October 13, 2015 Sophie Lampard Dennis
Goals for my First-Year Seminar students include proficiency with a host of study skills as well as course content based on what we call “learning about learning.” To support…
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The Names We Give to Our Instructional Strategies
September 18, 2015 Maryellen Weimer, PhD
Instructional strategies acquire names, labels that describe what the strategy involves—active learning, problem-based learning, cooperative learning. Sometimes the strategies gain popularity. They become widely used, and so do the…
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UDL: A Systematic Approach to Supporting Diverse Learners
September 14, 2015 Mark Hofer PhD
Advances in neuroscience and digital imaging give us an unprecedented understanding of how individuals access, process, and respond to information. Previously we may have had an intuitive understanding that…