Month: May 2017

What Being a High School Dropout Taught Me About Teaching

I recently began working on a project that looks at how teachers form their beliefs and conceptions of teaching. Like so much of learning, it seems teachers’ beliefs develop incidentally through experience and observation. Perhaps we model our beloved high school science teacher or we imagine ourselves rousing students from boredom a la Robin Williams […]

Alternatives and Tweaks to PowerPoints in Large Classes

By Fahd Rafiq As a PhD student in Political Science, I have spent most of my life in educational settings. From the time I graduated high school in 1998 until now, I’ve witnessed a transition from traditional chalk board teaching to PowerPoint slideshows. Although I believe PowerPoint slideshows can be useful, I argue that they […]

Video Recorded Assessments: Help Your Students, Save Your Sanity

by Sarah Myers I have given several oral presentation assignments over the course of my 5 year teaching experience in higher education. It wasn’t until after the third year of grading these presentations with no issues that a student approached me with questions about her grade. She insisted that she covered a particular aspect of […]

LGBTQIA+ Students Speak Out: An Interview about Inclusive Educational Support

By Timothy Bussey This is the fourth and final post by PhD candidate Timothy Bussey on inclusive teaching and curriculum for LGBTQIA+ students. The following interview was conducted with a diverse group of UConn undergraduate students, who are all members of the LGBTQIA+ community. These students were selected based upon their high level of achievement […]

Eliciting the Unheard Voices in Class with Alternative Forms of Participation

This is our second post in a five-part series on harnessing technology to engage students and advance their learning. Upcoming posts will focus on using video recordings to provide feedback and increase student metacognition, enhanced use of PowerPoints to drive student learning, and practical information on flipping the classroom and recording lectures. By Emma Bjorngard-Basayne […]