Around midterms, instructors tend to see student engagement plummet. Over the past few semesters, I’ve written about encouraging peer-to-peer engagement as well as a few tricks for getting your students talking. Today, I’m going to highlight two instructors who facilitate innovative and successful group work during class time. Sarah Fischer (PhD Candidate, Associate Instructor, Lieber… Read more »
When I was teaching introductory composition, my students often warned me early in the term that they were “bad at writing,” or “just not that good at English.” These statements were frustrating—who wants to begin a semester with unenthusiastic students? However, they also demonstrated a prevalence of what psychologist Carol Dweck dubs as the “fixed… Read more »
You’re heard some buzz about generative AI (genAI), and you’ve learned to mitigate some of the concerns. Students will be tempted to use generative AI on assignments that are too high stakes or too low stakes, so our goal as instructors should be to be transparent and demonstrate to our students why the assessments we… Read more »
In his 2019 monograph, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein defends the importance of developing a diverse skillset to achieve career success through a close investigation of some of the world’s top performers and experts. Generalists, he argues, are creative, out-of-the-box problem-solvers who fully embrace the power of knowing a little… Read more »
Why do you teach what you teach? Why should students care to learn what you teach? I think almost all instructors care deeply about the subject matter they’re studying and teaching because we understand the impact of our scholarship on the world, although this isn’t true with all our students. Community engaged learning is a… Read more »
I hope you enjoyed Dr. Sean Sidky’s previous blog post, Creating a warmer and more inclusive syllabus. Now that you have created your syllabus, how do you introduce it to students? Can you share the decisions you made in constructing the syllabus and designing the class? This transparency along with giving students input on parts… Read more »