Articles and resources to empower your teaching experience.
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As faculty, we are not generally in the habit of taking time to pause and appreciate our accomplishments. There is always the next class meeting to plan, the next set of grading to finish, the next book order to submit. And those are only the things on the “classes” section of our to-do lists.
So let me take a post-fall break minute to say congratulations and well done on making it halfway through the fall semester! On
When October fatigue hits us and our students at the same time, occasionally it is tempting, against all of our better Denison instincts, to take the path of least resistance and just provide information and hope that students are listening. For days when you feel yourself working to resist that impulse, “3 Ways to Liven Up Your Lectures” has some great tips and reminders for small changes to help keep your students (and yourself) engaged with the material and one another.
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!
Students frequently ask AI for feedback on their writing, so we need to teach them how to interpret that feedback. This week I am sharing some materials I developed to do that. In my W101, when students peer review rough drafts, I am now integrating lessons on AI feedback. I teach an 80-minute class, and during the first half, students work in pairs on a traditional peer review exercise.
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. |
