Tackling the Stack

As Daniel Cole notes – You can’t avoid it anymore: students have submitted their papers, and now you have to read, comment on and grade them. How can you give good feedback yet, at the same time, avoid overworking yourself?

Take a look at his two-page article from Inside Higher Ed, Tackling the Stack, for tips on end-of-semester grading.

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From the Teaching Archive – Getting Ready for Course Evaluations

When colleagues want me to observe their class for formative feedback, I always ask them to share two or three things they are working on in which feedback would be helpful. For example, working to involve more students, trying to summarize class in the last five minutes, organizing my board work, etc. This helps me to focus the observation and provide more useful feedback.

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Teaching – Helping Students Overcome Presentation Anxiety

As we near the end of the semester, many of us have projects that students present. These can be high stressors for students and a huge time sink for your course schedule. In this short two-page article, Dr. Traci Levy of Adelphi University describes a presentation format she calls the Presentation Cafe. On Presentation Cafe days, she divides the class into presentation slots, scheduling three or four groups to present simultaneously depending on class size.

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Teaching – Do late penalties do more harm than good?

Like many of us, I relaxed my due dates as we struggled with the pandemic. Now that we have just passed the second anniversary of the national lockdown, I’m beginning to reflect on my choices. On the one hand, I can point to certain students who benefited from this more empathetic approach (not a word that is often used to describe me), but doesn’t the “real world” operate on deadlines?

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Teaching – Course evals on the first day of class? by Yen Loh, English

Like newspapers, which may be read one day over morning coffee and may be used, as my grandmother did, to wrap vegetables the next day, student evaluations have second, subsequent, and multiple lives. In the classroom, student evaluations are usually resurrected at the mid and endpoints of the semester, but discussing prior course evaluations with your current students at the beginning of the semester can also help in telling the course’s story and the argument it’s trying to make through the act of re-seeing course readings and assignments.

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Teaching – Giving Students a Why

Showing compassion for our students but maintaining expectations is a tricky balancing act. This short Chronicle article, The Power of Telling Students Why, argues that we should explain to students why we have specific policies, rules, or deadlines. If we can’t, then maybe those things should be reconsidered. As noted in the article by one respondent: 

“I think it’s a form of respect for our students,” she continued, “to be able to have a why, and where we don’t have a good one, really then thinking about whether that’s a policy we can do without.”

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Teaching – Want to Bolster Creative Confidence, Improve Team Performance, or Try Something New?

The Red Frame Lab is here to amplify your learning outcomes with tools from design thinking and professional development modules used by RED Corps, Red Frame Consulting, and several of your fellow faculty. Last semester we teamed with Global Commerce, Psychology, Anthropology/Sociology, Data Analytics, and Environmental Studies classes as well as 18 Advising Circles. Ask your colleagues about their experiences.

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