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. 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. 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. 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 [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 4 | February 13, 2015 Return to the Playground: Truly Active Learning in the College Classroom One current trend in higher education is the shift from passive to active learning. In modern classrooms, we rarely see an all-knowing professor standing before a chalkboard disseminating knowledge for two or three hours [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 28 | November 21, 2014 Credit Cards for College Students . . . Let Me Explain! I am one of those educators who is always looking for strategies to get my students more engaged with course materials. I have found many good techniques throughout the years, and I have adopted [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 11 | April 4, 2014 Composition Pedagogy and Theory: Writing as Process and Product Since the New England Association of Teachers of English convention in 1972, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Donald M. Murray presented his landmark essay, "Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product" (Murray 3), the product-versus-process debate [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 7 | February 28, 2014 On Layers, Loops, and Learning Over the past decade we have made huge strides in understanding the wonders of brain development. If there are a hundred billion neurons and every neuron has the possibility of one to 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons, the complexities, [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 5 | February 14, 2014 Promoting Critical Thinking and Active Learning by “Teaching Backwards” “Teaching Backwards” is an instructional method that explores cause-and-effect relationships by examining a series of connected events, starting with the last event first and proceeding backwards. Inspired by the movie “Memento,” this method promotes critical thinking [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 3 | January 31, 2014 Students' Questions Open New Paths to Explore In "Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers," a course for pre-service teachers, I decided that the homework would always be the same. The students would ask three questions using the following format: "My question is…" and "I ask it [...]