All Teaching Strategies Are Not Equal In his book, The Missing Course, Goobler (2019) argues that while college is changing, the way we prepare college professors is not. Most graduate students are still trained primarily to conduct research, receiving little to no pedagogical training in their graduate programs. Think about your own pedagogical training. Although many
Easy Active Teaching Strategies for Engaged Learning As the Spring sunshine beckons students away from their studies and they drift into a mid-semester slump, it can be challenging to engage them in learning. “To learn, students need to DO something” (Gonzalez, 2018), which is why active learning is an important strategy in any classroom. As
Distracted Students: Are Digital Devices the Real Challenge? Educators today are quick to blame digital devices for distracting their students and subsequently impose policies banning devices in the classroom. But before we had digital devices, students’ attention drifted out the window, waxed and waned throughout a course or period. James Lang argues, “whenever we are
Creating Interactive Lectures and Active Discussions Research tells us that students are more likely to be engaged and to retain information in an active learning environment than in a purely lecture-based class. Creating interactive lectures that include active discussions encourages student engagement and helps develop students’ critical thinking and communication skills. Active class discussions also
Massed Practice Does Not Make Perfect Research tells us that cramming, a form of Massed Practice, isn’t effective for long-term retention of information. Distributed Practice has proven to be more effective in helping students retain information. Instead of students spending long periods of time studying or practicing something they’ve just learned or right before an
Priming Students for Success Students come to us with a wealth of preexisting knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes, which influence how they attend to, interpret, and organize new information. How they process information will, in turn, influence how they recall, think, apply, and create new knowledge. Having a sense of what students know and can
Providing Meaningful & Effective Feedback One of the most important factors leading to students’ academic growth is the quality of feedback they receive from their instructors. Woolf (2020) and other researchers suggest that meaningful and effective feedback is 1) regular and ongoing, 2) specific and actionable, referencing aspects of a specific learning outcome or objective
Your colleagues at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) would like to welcome the instructional faculty back to a new term at Chapman. As the new Executive Director of CETL, I am thrilled to be working alongside Dr. Melissa Rowland-Goldsmith (Co-Director, Pedagogical Coach, and Faculty Member in Schmid College) and Dr. Melissa