By Andrew Miller Think back to your college mathematics courses. What is one word to describe how students in that class were learning? Does the word “passive” come to mind? Having taken countless math courses throughout my undergraduate and graduate career, I can confidently say that the structure of most courses is the same. Instructors […]
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Non-Traditional is the New Norm: Lessons from Teaching at Community Colleges
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a two-part series focused on working with community college students and/or alumni. Please also see Samantha Lawrence’s post on challenging the community college stigma. By Katie Webber When referring to “college students”, many people think of a typical 18 to 22-year-old admitted fresh out of high school. […]
Challenging the Stigma of Community College Students & Alumni
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a two-part series on working with community college students and/or alumni. Samantha E. Lawrence The word “college” is often connoted with emerging adults attending 4-year universities as “full-time students,” living in dorms, and balancing their course loads with keg parties. Students’ college experiences, however, may differ radically […]
Prompting and Scaffolding Student Thinking
By Kristi Kaeppel Throughout my teaching career, I’ve seen standards for students’ academic performance rise and curricula adjust to meet new demands. These well-intentioned efforts by policy makers and administrators have done a good job of identifying skills that students should gain during their education, but it’s been left to instructors themselves to figure out […]
The Writing Classroom as Studio
“While the fields of writing and science might strike many as completely different if not diametrically opposed, once I began to look more closely at their histories, I realized how much was shared. Notions of learning by doing—as opposed to learning by listening to lectures and regurgitating that content on multiple-choice exams, whether that doing […]
A Short Pause Goes a Long Way: Using the Pause Procedure in Teaching
By Anna Marie LaChance Picture yourself as an undergraduate student, sitting in a standard lecture hall, staring at a whiteboard as a professor makes their way through a long lecture. Maybe it’s a detailed mathematical derivation or a careful dissection of a literary work. You and the nearly one hundred other students sit in silence […]
More Than an Athlete: Teaching the Whole Student
Stay informed of our latest posts plus resources on teaching by subscribing to our monthly newsletter! In one of my first sections as a Philosophy Teaching Assistant at UConn, I overheard an exchange between a student athlete and another classmate that I will never forget. As the students were packing up and heading out, the […]
Improving Learning Through Story Generation
By Emily Ng The use of storytelling in the classroom to enhance student learning has been shown to promote critical thinking, information recall, and interest. One way stories do this is by tapping into students’ sense of self-relevance which allows them to explore aspects of the content that they can relate their own experiences or goals […]
Public Speaking Tips for New Instructors
By Maria DelGreco When I was first accepted into a graduate program in communication, I was assigned to be a discussion instructor for Public Speaking, a class that I had never taken let alone taught before. I was barely older than my students, fresh out of an undergraduate program, with zero teaching experience, and I […]
Your Lecture is as Unmoving as the Podium You Are Standing Behind
By Ashley Dhaim There are many less than optimal circumstances that affect teaching: early or late class times, class size, technology in the classroom–the list goes on and on. While the limitations on teaching are endless, there is one thing that we as teachers can turn into an opportunity for learning: the space of the […]