Volume XLI, No. 10 | March 21, 2019 Why Ask “Why?”: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines Introduction Critical thinking is valuable when preparing students for academic and economic advancement. Critical thinking is also valuable for intrinsic reasons as part of living a good life. Despite the fact that we are faculty members [...]
Volume XLI, No. 9 | March 14, 2019 Scaffold, Reinforce, Imagine: Society Building in the World History Classroom Introduction I have been teaching World History I to community college students for seven years. During my fifth year, I grew tired of reading and grading essays and suspected that my students felt the [...]
Volume XLI, No. 8 | March 7, 2019 Building Skills for Writing Anthropologically I teach an anthropology course that emphasizes intensive writing and cultural and global diversity through a series of progressively elevated anthropological writing experiences. I introduce students to anthropological writing through seven skills-building assignments followed by multimodal presentations and class [...]
Volume XLI, No. 7 | February 28, 2019 Rules of Engagement Helping students grasp the real-world stakes of a lesson is a struggle that many teachers face. As culinary instructors we try to simulate a live service, but demonstrating all the responsibilities of a chef, all the decisions that a chef needs [...]
Volume XLI, No. 6 | February 21, 2019 Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I Woman” Speech and the Creation of Ethos The lesson I discuss below addresses character creation, stereotypes, and credibility. In it I examine four versions of Sojourner Truth’s famous speech, commonly titled “Ain’t I a Woman.” I invite students to identify [...]
Volume XLI, No. 5 | February 14, 2019 Ways to Encourage Student Participation in the Classroom Whether you are a seasoned instructor or one who recently started teaching, everyone at some time or another has faced a lack of student participation in the classroom. The sound of crickets, blank stares, eye contact [...]
Volume XLI, No. 4 | February 7, 2019 CHEERS Every semester, I create a to-do list of a new teaching methods to try or previous teaching methods to put a twist on. In particular, I try to implement suggestions students offer for improving my classroom. My continued self-reflections on how to improve [...]
Volume XLI, No. 3 | January 31, 2019 Daily Attendance Quizzes I am a punctual person. The joke in my family is that I was born eight days late and have never been late since then. A few years ago, I was going crazy when almost half of my students were showing [...]
Volume XLI, No. 2 | January 24, 2019 Can Science Survive Without the Humanities? A Forgotten Creative Reciprocity! The Academy of Arts and Sciences made the following statement in the Executive Summary of their 2013 The Heart of the Matter report: “Scientific advances have been critical to the extraordinary achievements of the [...]
Volume XLI, No. 1 | January 17, 2019 Time to Reflect: Common Teaching Challenges and Solutions Because we are in the middle of the current academic year and on the precipice of the Spring 2019 semester, now is a perfect time to reflect on best teaching practices related to classroom management. Although [...]
