Volume XXXVII, No. 8 | March 13, 2015 No Professional Development Funds: What to Do While Doing Without Yikes! I’m ready to travel to my favorite conference, but some unwelcome (and unsurprising) news interrupts my plans: no professional development travel funds are available unless the requested travel is “mission critical.” Recent years of [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 15 | May 8, 2015 Roll Out the Welcome Mat: Using Hope, Hospitality, and Humor to Create a Comfortable Classroom The welcome mat is often the first thing that many of us see when we visit someone. It sends a clear message to visitors that they are entering a welcoming [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 14 | May 1, 2015 The First Day of Class: People Before Paper The first day of class is arguably the most important day of the school term, since this is when impressions are made, trust starts, and relationships either begin or are dashed. As teachers, we must think about [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 13 | April 24, 2015 Doing Literature: Using the Cognitive Learning Strategy of Elaborating to Help Students Interpret Texts Introduction One of the courses I most look forward to teaching is “Introduction to Literature,” a general education course intended to (re)familiarize students with such foundational literary elements as character, plot, [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 12 | April 17, 2015 Getting Under the Hood: How and for Whom Does Increasing Course Structure Work There has been some buzz about teaching practices in higher education that is getting louder. Instructors listening to the noise may feel a pressure to change the way they have been teaching [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 11 | April 10, 2015 Teaching Critical Thinking Dispositions Mortimer Adler, the founder of the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, once famously wrote that critical thinking could not be taught. In his essay, “Critical Thinking Programs: Why They Won’t Work,” Adler wrote, “I would almost say that, [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 10 | April 3, 2015 Reading Aloud to Break the Ice Community college students who have a long commute may not be able to participate in peer interactions that are readily available to students attending residential colleges and universities. Also, these students often have jobs before and after class, which [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 7 | March 6, 2015 Measuring General Education Learning: A Faculty-Driven, Distributed Network Approach For three consecutive evaluations by the Aspen Institute, West Kentucky Community and Technical College (WKCTC) has been named a top-ten community college in the nation. This recognition is due in part to the implementation of a [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 6 | February 27, 2015 Rethinking Honors Programs for Community Colleges The traditional model for a community college honors program, analogous in focus to most honors programs at four-year institutions, centers on providing the best and the brightest students with an enriched education, generally in a rarified academic environment—that is, [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 5 | February 20, 2015 The Chef and His Accountant: A Collaborative Venture Into Progressive Thinking “I’m sorry, Professor, but I just don’t care about what happened to those people so long ago. This is a hard subject for me.” This student comment came after a class in which we [...]
