discussion

2017 Teaching Highlights 🎉

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 […]

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.