The Book that Brought Me Back to What Matters in Teaching
Just why this book—Patrick Sullivan’s too plainly titled A New Writing Classroom: Listening, Motivation, and Habits of Mind—reached me in just the way it did is a more involved story […]
The Assignments Students Remember for Years
The recent book The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education (Utah State University Press, 2016) is an exemplary work of pedagogical scholarship for Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, […]
Conversation on Naomi S. Baron’s Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World
Watch Matt Huett and Paul T. Corrigan’s discussion of Naomi S. Baron’s book Words on Screen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford UP, 2015). The book offers an […]
Success and Other Obstacles to Learning
In Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing—a fascinating, important, award-winning book that comes from the discipline of writing studies and has broad implications for teaching and learning […]
“Yes, and” as Teaching-Learning Methodology
Omar Ali and Nadja Cech present ‘Yes, and,’ a concept derived from improvisational theatre, as a teaching-learning methodology that supports engaged experiential learning. In this approach, the leader of the group and co-participants affirm each other and creatively build on what any and all bring to the conversation and activity at hand. The approach can enhance academic excellence by cultivating confidence, creativity, and collaboration.
Why Literature? Or Any Discipline?
Why do you teach what you teach? Why should students study what you teach? How do you help them see that? To answer this for my own discipline, I’ve been researching recent apologias for literature, defenses of reading or teaching literature written since, say, around the turn of the century.
Getting Students to Talk to Each Other, Rather than the Teacher
In class discussions, students often speak only to the teacher—and the teacher responds to every point. Inspired by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching, I’ve written a structured protocol for class discussion that gets students talking to each other. So far, it’s leads to much more give-and-take among students.
