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Classroom Discussion: Professors Share Favorite Strategies for Engaging Students

In the typical college classroom a small handful of students make the vast majority of comments. As a teacher you want to create a classroom environment that helps students of various learning styles and personalities to feel comfortable enough to contribute as well as understand the importance of class preparation and active participation. To reach this goal requires a constant balancing act of encouraging quiet, reflective students to speak up and, occasionally, asking the most active contributors to hold back from commenting in order to give others a chance.

Mary Bart July 9, 2012

Creating an Ongoing Feedback Loop with Your Students

Feedback is often given to students after the fact. After they completed their assignments, and after they turned in their exams. Likewise, faculty receive feedback from students in much the same fashion. After a paper is late because they didn’t know how to submit it electronically, after they dug a grading hole that will be difficult to climb out of, or after the course has ended.

Mary Bart July 2, 2012

Professional Faculty Development: The Necessary Fourth Leg

The well-known three-legged stool of academic life—teaching, research, and service—has been assumed to cover the main responsibilities of faculty in academic communities. But is there a missing leg that would add strength and stability to the stool? I propose there is. It’s professional faculty development, and I would also propose that faculty committed to teaching should be its most articulate advocates.

Alan Altany June 29, 2012

Preventing Bullying in the Academic Workplace

Does your institution have a policy that addresses bullying? If it does not, there are some pretty compelling reasons to consider creating such a policy. In an interview with Academic Leader, Suzanne Milton, chair of the faculty bargaining unit at Eastern Washington University, talked about bullying and its consequences, and ways to address it to create a workplace more conducive to getting work done without a lot of problems.

Rob Kelly June 28, 2012

Four Levels of Student Reflection

Promoting reflection is a goal endorsed by many faculty. They believe that students need to develop skills that will enable them to look at a piece of work they produce or an aspect of their professional practice and make accurate judgments about it. It’s not an easy skill to acquire, and practice is essential to its development. If teachers are giving students opportunities to reflect, they need to be able to assess how well students are reflecting and provide feedback that deepens the students’ skills.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 26, 2012

Five Techniques for Improving Student Attendance

The general consensus among most faculty members is that regular class attendance helps students learn and retain the course content more effectively. According to Park & Kerr (1990), research demonstrates that the lack of attendance was statistically significant in explaining why a student received a poor grade.

Rick Sheridan June 25, 2012

Making Online PowerPoint Content Engaging: Preparing for High-Quality Narration

Slides, even with text and graphics on them, aren’t particularly as good as instructional content because someone needs to explain what’s on each slide. You are still the presenter and you should explain, right? (Right.)

Patti Shank PhD CPT June 21, 2012

Helping Students Write Better Lab Reports

One of the messages of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that writing skills can be developed in any course and that often the best place to start is with current assignments that involve writing. That’s where chemists Gragson and Hagen started. They were disappointed in the quality of student writing in their “journal-style” lab reports. Despite giving students a sample lab, a writing manual, and lots of good feedback, the quality of the lab reports was low and did not improve across the 10 to 15 lab reports students prepared.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 19, 2012

Students Share Their Thoughts on Active Learning

“Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.”
– A. Chickering and Z.F. Gamson, “Seven principles for good practice,” AAHE Bulletin 39 (March 1987), 3-7.

Mary Bart June 18, 2012

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