Volume XXXVII, No. 26 | November 6, 2015 Student Engagement: Getting 21st-Century Students Hooked Into Your Instruction When I enter a class, I'm thinking about several things—getting my points across clearly, hoping that students show up willing to have relevant discussions rather than engaging with their cell phones, and hoping that my [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 25 | October 30, 2015 Peer Revision: Build Classroom Writing Community Through Academic Conversation It is hard to teach writing in a quiet classroom because writing is a conversation. For students to be successful academic writers, they need to be successful academic conversationalists, especially in Composition II’s hallmark genre, [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 24 | October 23, 2015 Our Students’ Soft Skills Scarcity: Why Academics Affairs Should Lead the Effort Our finest students stood nervously as our university’s president sized them up during inspection. In a few moments, these students would meet the State Chancellor for Higher Education, the Oklahoma State University system [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 23 | October 16, 2015 Large Scale Faculty Development: A Taxonomy of Faculty Perspectives on Teaching Men of Color Enhancing success and learning outcomes for students who have been historically underrepresented and underserved in education remains a key challenge facing America's community colleges. While many states have taken up the [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 22 | October 9, 2015 Using QR Codes as Communication and Documentation Tools in Higher Education Lehigh Carbon Community College’s (LCCC) Teacher Education department recently started using QR codes to address some specific marketing and instructional needs. Because the department includes more than six major programs taught in various formats, [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 21 | October 2, 2015 Tests Are Not Enough Measuring student classroom learning is now among the top concerns identified by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), and pressure is increasing to hold teachers more strictly accountable for it. Although student-evaluation-of-teacher surveys may be institutionally helpful, they have [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 20 | September 25, 2015 Don't Tell Me I'm Not "College Ready" "College Ready." Those of us in higher education say the words "not college ready" all the time without thinking about how these words affect the students we're describing. Neither do we stop to consider how the label "not [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 19 | September 18, 2015 Striving for Enhanced Understanding and Retention (Contextualized Learning) I’d like for you to think about a time when you attended a class or lecture and were really excited about learning more about the subject matter. Now I want you to compare the feeling you had [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 18 | September 11, 2015 Making the Transition to Teaching at a Community College: Perspectives and Insights When I began as an Assistant Professor of English at Broward Community College (now Broward College) in 2008, I had to make the transition to teaching at a community college. Up until that [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 16 | August 28, 2015 On Giving Students the Gift of Time Ask any group of students what they wish they had more of and 99.9 percent of them will respond, "Time." This is especially true at the community college level where students struggle to balance academics with work and [...]