Today’s author is Cherie Lynn Ramirez, PhD (Curriculum Fellow, Harvard Global Health Institute) Bok Blog Editor Stephen A. Walsh recently reflected on Dr. Maryellen Weimer’s Faculty Focus piece offering some practical advice on how to get students to write their own test questions in a way that stimulates metacognition about learning and assessment. One particularly … Continue reading »
Tag Archives: faculty focus
Around the Web: Measuring Up, Down, or Maybe Sideways
Charles Duhigg’s New York Times Magazine feature on the power of habit and how advertisers exploit it makes for a fascinating read. The way habits work is also very suggestive for a university setting, where we form so many habits, only to form a new set the next semester. How might we identify the cues, … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Best Practices
The White House recently called on the nation’s universities to produce more science graduates by adopting better teaching techniques. But which teaching techniques are most effective? A new study shows that learner-centered courses, taken early in a college career, can prime students to get more out of traditional lecture courses. Tomorrow’s Professor shares Jason N. … Continue reading »
Around the Web: New Frontiers
Several recent news stories focused attention on the closely interrelated issues, in higher education, of technological innovation, rising costs, academic elitism, and personal, individualized small-class instruction. Apple entered the digital textbook market (prompting some skepticism); President Obama addressed the cost of higher education in his State of the Union Address; MIT announced that it would … Continue reading »
Around the Web: New Year, New Semester
Happy New Year! With the start of a new semester comes the opportunity to tweak your teaching persona and to try a couple of new approaches. Faculty Focus reports the results of a survey in which students were asked to describe their ideal professor and their typical professor, and suggests one way to bridge the gap: … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Our Minds, Our Learning
What’s in a brain? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lang offers the first installment of a two-part post on memory: how it really works (hint: it’s not the long-outmoded tripartite model—long-term, short-term, and sensory—on which many faculty members still base their pedagogy), and how it might inform the way we teach. Some elementary schools are … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Hitting the Books
What will the textbook of the future look like? There has been a lot of buzz about e-textbooks this year. Will the iPad be the platform that turns the tide? What will collaborations between book publishers and educational platforms bring? Will late-adopting professors, publisher restrictions, questionable fees, and the nonexistence of a secondary market doom the conversion to digital? Will open-source … Continue reading »
Around the Web: Blogging to Learn
Blogging might just be the next academic frontier, if you believe the New York Times. But does the medium lend itself to student learning? John Orlando at Faculty Focus thinks it does. Arguing that blogging harkens back to commonplacing, he advocates for blogs as a space where students’ original ideas can smolder until the moment … Continue reading »
Around the Web: The Two Faces of Cheating
What does it mean when the teachers do the cheating on their students’ behalf? There has been a raft of scandals this year, in Atlanta, L.A., and New York, in which public-school teachers altered test answers to raise their schools’ scores. Things look similarly upside-down in the conflict of interest between TurnItIn and WriteCheck. Owned by the same company, … Continue reading »
Getting Students to Talk to Each Other: Group Exercises
As the semester grinds into gear, why not spice things up with a group exercise? Ye olde divide-and-discuss can elicit groans, but group exercises with a clear purpose can be a really effective tool for peer-to-peer learning. In his recent book review, Nathan Stein, Departmental Teaching Fellow in Statistics describes an exercise in which each … Continue reading »
