While it’s easy to be cynical about the sentimentality and goal-setting that accompanies the end of a year, we believe reflection and self-improvement are always laudable goals and ones that are at the heart of good pedagogy. Before we turn to thinking about ways can improve our teaching practice in 2018, let’s take a moment […]
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Building Classroom Dialogue Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge
By Andrew Miller Classroom discourse can often be difficult to achieve. Whether you are a teaching assistant, new faculty member, or tenured faculty, getting students to answer and ask questions is a challenge all instructors face. This is especially true in the sciences where students often have anxiety about the subject, little interest, and the […]
Bringing the Current into the Classroom: Thoughts on Tackling Tough Topics with Our Students
In our valiant efforts to integrate important current topics in our classes, we need support from the university and from each other, to discuss and exchange advice and strategies on doing this well. We will need support in the form of forgiving ourselves if it doesn’t always go well. We will need to recognize that some of our classes may become tense and uncomfortable (as a story I’ll share below illustrates). To actually open minds to consider new viewpoints and shift deep-seated beliefs and biases is a precarious, slow, and often uncomfortable process. But then, such is learning.
Using @Twitter in the Classroom
By Marc Reyes Articles about scholars using Twitter typically ask if you should bring the social networking platform into the classroom. The more appropriate question is how you should use Twitter in your course. If the last few years have taught us anything about the ever-changing social media landscape, it’s that Twitter is a force […]
The Gift of Gab: 10 Ways to Inspire Classroom Discussion
If we are not excited about the course material we teach as instructors, why should we expect our students to care? The energy we inject into the classroom can be “a contagious fire” (Lang, 176), and our interest, enthusiasm, and passion for what we are teaching serves as a model for inviting students to partake in the energy too.