Volume XXXVIII, No. 29 | December 1, 2016 Using a New Tool in a New Way Many students find studying difficult, perhaps because they’ve never been taught how to study. There is ample evidence that shows repeated exposure to course material, especially in different contexts, helps move course material into long-term memory (Baddeley, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 28 | November 17, 2016 Teach Students HOW to Learn: Metacognition is the Key! “Miriam, a freshman calculus student at Louisiana State University (LSU), made 37.5 percent on her first exam, but 83 percent and 93 percent on the next two exams. Robert, a first-year general chemistry student at LSU, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 27 | November 10, 2016 Close Reading With Open Eyes Learning to read a text closely and carefully is a practical skill that serves students in any discipline—and introductory literature is no exception. Every semester of my English 1302 course begins with an introduction to tragedy and the ancient Greeks, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 26 | November 3, 2016 Is Fair Grading Futile? Evaluating and Rethinking Assessment "Teachers often replicate what they experienced as students.” –Pula Stitt Educator Challenges What is one of the most challenging aspects about your job as an educator? The usual suspects come to my mind: time constraints, course load, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 25 | October 27, 2016 Using Dilemmas and Case Studies to Promote Critical Thinking and Interpersonal Skills “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” – Albert Einstein For many of us, our student populations are diverse—military, veterans, fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, caretakers, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 24 | October 20, 2016 What You May Teach Without Knowing It Consider the things you learn without being fully aware that you are actually learning them. For instance, what can you learn from simply walking into a new building for the first time? With everyone and everything you observe, [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 23 | October 14, 2016 Peer Review and Cultural Diversity “People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are ‘owned’ by the teacher.” – Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed “Why do we need to peer review? It seems to be an [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 22 | October 7, 2016 Creating a Culture of Evidence With Course-Level Dashboards At many community colleges, faculty and administrators have a long list of unmet data needs. In order to submit a data request to a typically small, overworked Institutional Research (IR) department, faculty and administrators often need to [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 21 | September 29, 2016 Blogging for Beginners: Recording a Semester of Teaching Online In creating a daily digital diary, I documented what it was like to teach a fully online teaching load. I blogged for 116 days during the 16-week spring 2016 semester, recording the challenges, successes, and unpredictable events [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 20 | September 23, 2016 Commitment to Honesty: Easier Said Than Done . . . Or Is It? Academic dishonesty is an issue most faculty members have faced or will face during their teaching career. Situations in which students engage in cheating behaviors can range from minor lapses in judgment to [...]