This semester I put together what I call a ‘packet’ of discussion topics for my Family Communication course that we, as a class, discussed over the course of the semester. I was really pleased with the way it turned it. As we read about and discussed the concepts in class, we watched relatable videos, tied…
After reading last week’s post, Why Students Benefit from Participation & Class Discussions, a longtime friend and reader of the blog decided to try a new approach to teaching her class and reached out to me for some tips. I was thorough enough that I figured my (very long) response to her would serve as…
This semester I’ve been teaching a Family Communication class that I’ve loved every second of. I taught the class online a few years ago, but the face-to-face version has been a completely different experience, and I’m seeing my students grasp the concepts much more easily this time around- applying the textbook terms to their own…
I’ve been using the ‘flipped classroom’ approach to teaching since before I knew what the term meant. I’m sure I’m not the only instructor who intuitively felt that talking at students for a few hours each week, and then sending them home to do outside work wouldn’t be the best learning strategy. Instead, I had…
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I’ve been working on some face-to-face classroom activities (that I’ve also tried out with my online classes) to help my students answer and analyze questions/concepts more thoroughly in future assignments. After experimenting a little bit, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results. Any instructor, regardless of what…
The dean at one of my local colleges goes through the trouble of sending out department-wide emails each week with school updates and interesting articles we might be interested in reading. As an online instructor, I probably appreciate these weekly emails more than most instructors since it keeps me in the loop, so I try…
When I started teaching, I was constantly looking for blogs and websites with helpful tips for college instructors. I found plenty of blogs for secondary education teachers, and a number of stuffy, hard-to-read higher education blogs, but I wanted something more personal and relatable, and definitely not a blog that felt like work. Over time…
Have you ever asked students to ‘evaluate,’ ‘analyze,’ or ‘discuss’ a particular concept, only to feel deflated when you get back a (nearly) copy and pasted textbook definition from a number of students? First, you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong as the instructor; I felt at fault when I started seeing this pattern in assignments,…
During the past few weeks, I’ve been a student in an online faculty development course to prepare myself to teach an upcoming International Business Communication class. The course focuses on global learning, but much of the material discusses the basics that college instructors need to know (and potentially share with their students) about simplifying the…
Although Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) have been used in the classroom for decades, and I feel fairly well-versed in different teaching methods, I can honestly say this was a new one for me until I learned about it in a recent faculty development course. VTS tends to be used in more artistic or visually-reliant fields,…