Teaching Tips

It’s easy to assume that on a small campus like Denison, our students are already well-socialized and highly connected with one another before they ever get to our classrooms. But in the wake of Covid-19 and other dynamics of the 2020s, even Denison students often need some coaching to connect with each other.  “Why One Professor Fosters Friendship in her Courses” offers some specific reasons and strategies for encouraging student connections, and if you take a minute to ask around, your Denison colleagues probably have even more!

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In the lively Teaching Matters conversation last week about “Why We Teach,” a colleague raised this question: How do we help our anxiety-laden students make connections between our classroom learning goals and the other things they are trying to accomplish in college?

One of those student goals is building a career path, but as academic faculty, we don’t always feel prepared to talk to students about how the thinking they do in our courses might connect to possible professions beyond academia. We

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By week 5 of the semester, the rubber has hit the road, and our students can be feeling (and acting) overwhelmed. Providing consistent messaging about the challenges and value of the learning process is one of the many things that we can offer that can help them to build their own life coping strategies in the long run.

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As we navigate the fourth week of classes, you may be experiencing that moment when your summer vision of the semester, so carefully laid out in your syllabus, starts to bump up against your students’ busy schedules and reading habits. Although a quiet day in class may sometimes mean that students didn’t do the reading, John Orlando observes that other times it means that “many students simply didn’t get the needed information out of the assigned texts.”

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I know that I’m taking a risk here with this week’s title, throwing it out blithely to an audience professionally trained to be skeptical of the positive and always to look carefully and deeply for the potential negatives of any situation. But please (please!) bear with me. As we officially head into autumn, with its dwindling daylight hours, intensifying grading loads, fluctuating student (and faculty) energy, and seemingly perpetual chaos in our information streams, it can be easy to focus on frustrations and challenges in the classroom. One

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The energy of our September classrooms is part of what keeps us all in this education game.  How do you keep that high-level of energy and student focus as the semester builds and everyone’s busy-ness and distraction sets in?  Your November self will thank your September self for thinking ahead about strategies for cultivating student attention throughout the semester.

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“I am so excited to be back at Denison and to be using my brain muscles in this way again!” I heard this last week from a senior who has just returned from an outstanding semester abroad experience but couldn’t stop smiling about being back in our liberal arts setting and digging into her Denison classes.

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Planning the first day of class can be both exciting and overwhelming–so much possibility!  Amidst all of our first-day goals,  Paul Hanstedt’s article, On the First Day of Class, Begin with Intrigue, encourages us to focus on connecting with our students by setting a tone of curiosity and intrigue that will set you and your students up to work together as a community of thinkers and learners for the semester.

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