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. 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. 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. 19 | September 15, 2016 Helping Students Value Challenge and Hard Work In postsecondary classrooms, we should help students move beyond the “empty vessel” model of learning to a model that encompasses self-directed, strategic learning. For many years, I struggled to identify ways or approaches that help students to see [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 18 | September 8, 2016 Outside the Classroom and Beyond the Campus: Community-Based Experiential Education Expanding the Experiential Concept After years of incorporating a combination of field trips, active learning, and flipped classrooms, I decided to design a radically flipped course in which I would leverage technology to craft class [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 15 | May 6, 2016 Economics: The Not-So-Dismal Science Economics has a reputation for being a dismal science. You can make the argument that any subject matter is dismal, and that how it’s taught is what makes all the difference. I think economics is anything but dismal. Economics is the [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 15 | May 3, 2013 Thought for the Week Wednesdays: Making Connections in Minutes Can five minutes of classroom time once a week really make a difference? I set out to answer this question as I sought to improve retention and student success in my pre-curriculum reading classes. I [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 13 | April 22, 2016 How Students Can—and Should—Contribute to the Rubric Creation Process I was in a kindergarten classroom a few weeks ago and was mesmerized by a rubric that was detailed on a large flipchart at the back of the room. It was titled “My Star Paper” [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 12 | April 15, 2016 Too Many Screens? Try Collaborative Note-Taking There are two major problems that face the modern professor. The first is students who are underprepared for note-taking or who, worse still, have no conception of it. The second is students who are distracted by multiple screens. Finding [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 10 | April 1, 2016 If You Can’t Beat It, Integrate It: Using Smartphones and Polling Software to Create an Interactive Learning Environment A common complaint among educators is the number of distracted students in their classes. Many of us bemoan students in our classes engrossed in their smartphones instead [...]