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 […]
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.
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.
Students face strong motivations to skip or skim readings. In courses where reading is integral to the intellectual work of the discipline, that severely undermines learning. How can we get students to read and read well? In this post, I share some scenarios worth pondering and a link to an article I’ve written on teaching critical, contemplative, and active reading.
Gerald Nelms explains how student plagiarism is very often less of a cut-and-dried crime than it appears. Research shows that successfully avoiding plagiarism—while also paraphrasing and integrating material from sources—requires complex skills that take time and practice to develop. We can see instances of plagiarism as opportunities to help students learn these skills.
Laura L. Runge shares practical advice on writing pedagogical articles on teaching literature, based on her experience editing the pedagogy section of a scholarly journal on literature. In some ways, pedagogical articles are similar to other scholarly articles on literature. In other ways, they differ.
In one survey, only 8 percent of college teachers reported “taking any account” of research on teaching and learning into preparing their courses. The first annual Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. reading drive invites college teachers and others involved in college teaching and learning to read at least one book on teaching and learning this school year.
