By Megan Lyons In March 2020, when academic institutions across the country shifted to online instruction, instructors faced a quandary. They could either be passive, simply transferring their in-person teaching methods to an online environment, or they could be active, innovating their lessons and striving to connect with students across this new modality of teaching. […]
student engagement
Student Engagement: Where to Start As a Teaching Assistant
By Elizabeth Herder When I started in graduate school, I was expected to teach three laboratory sections of Fundamentals of Microbiology. I was anxious to perform well in this position. I, like so many others of my peer group, had heard phrases like “active learning” and “student engagement” but without having a clear understanding of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Three Insights From Feminist Pedagogy
By Kristi Kaeppel In honor of International Women’s Day, I wanted to write a post that explored the contributions of feminist pedagogy. As has been said with other “alternative pedagogies” (such as culturally relevant teaching), feminist teaching is not an outlier approach with radical ideas but rather incorporates sound, evidence-based practices. Many of these ideas, […]
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 […]