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 […]
Category Archives: Scholarship on Teaching and Learning
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, […]
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.
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.
How Can We Get Students to Read Well?
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.
Why Plagiarism Doesn’t Bother Me At All: A Research-Based Overview of Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity
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.
