As a staunch believer in grades, I was hesitant at first to engage with the practice of ungrading. I mean, who doesn’t love working hard and getting that gold star as a reward? Am I right? Grades, for me, became a source of comfort—I knew I was performing well and achieving the goals my instructor… Read more »
Entries by Ren Maloney
Finding Ports in the Storm: Breaking Up Teaching Portfolio Construction into Manageable Sections
Teaching portfolios are large documents used majorly for academic job applications and promotion. They serve as collections for everything surrounding your teaching, including teaching statements, diversity statements, syllabi, activities, lesson plans, teaching evaluations, course descriptions, and fourth wall-breaking justifications or explanations for pedagogical choices. This daunting list can create some anxieties about where to start,… Read more »
Keeping Records of Student Emails for Teaching Statement Evidence
There are two main components to any good teaching statement or promotion dossier: 1) thorough explanation of the essential tenets of your teaching philosophy, and 2) examples of these essential tenants that foreground your students doing cool things in your course as a result of your pedagogical choices. As you are teaching and working, create… Read more »
Grading Strategies for Final Exams/Essays
As final exams and final essays begin to peak out from their lurking places, I wanted to provide some strategies for efficient grading to assuage some of our anxieties surrounding late exam days this semester. (My students and I were unlucky enough to book a December 20th final exam day.) Here are some quick ideas… Read more »
Reflective Teaching Practices
So often, as we teach and reteach the same courses, we accidentally fall into a pattern of repetition. Certainly, for those of us who have taught the same courses with the same student learning outcomes, we have found the activities that work, dismissed the ones that don’t, and only overhaul a course when it becomes… Read more »
Quick Tip: Fun Activity Ideas
As we get started with the semester, I wanted to encourage us all to begin thinking of ways to engage our students from the get-go with some fun activities! Group Scavenger Hunt If you put your students in groups at the beginning of the semester, have them get to know each other with a group… Read more »