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,…
I had an epiphany last week (ask anyone who knows me well, many of my sentences start with the phrase, “You know, I have this theory..”). So let me rephrase that, I have this theory that there are certain things that help us or hinder us when trying to get into ‘flow’ as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi…
Since I started phasing out energy drinks over a year ago, and then gradually eliminated my daily coffee fix, I’ve been trying to find a way to keep my productivity up. As someone who works from home on a computer every day and relies on self-motivation, this has not been easy without caffeine. You see,…
When I wrote the book Happy Professor two years ago, I was living in a studio apartment with my husband, who drove a beat up car and was interning with the company he now works for, while I drove to college campuses all over Central Florida to teach as an adjunct, only having dabbled in…
If you haven’t figured out how to cut down on the time you spend answering student emails, I may have the answer for you! When I tell other teachers that I have a number of stock email responses ready to go in the Notes app of my iPhone, some of them are relieved to have…
As I was reading Shonda Rhimes’ book The Year of Yes the other day, I started feeling like I wasn’t quite measuring up. In my mind, I had been living the ‘year of yes’ since I was a college freshman, deliberately grabbing every opportunity that came my way, and I had decided that 2016 would…
Every teacher knows that sometimes you have a class that’s super motivated, while another class is barely hanging in there. There’s not necessarily a rhyme or reason for it, it just happens. The solution? I won’t attempt to go into that at the moment, but you can do a variety of activities, see how things…
I know I’m not the only teacher that feels completely wiped out by the end of the workday. I tend to run low on energy whether I’m lecturing on my feet all day, or grading papers from a coffee shop. And since I gave up my regular caffeine fix nearly a year ago, I decided…
When I was preparing to travel to Los Angeles, Thailand, San Diego, and Arizona for a month, I didn’t have the type of schedule that would allow me to exert the time needed to do the type of planning necessary, so I took the most logical steps I could: I jotted notes to myself in…
The other day I was sifting through some old ideas in my ‘Notes’ app, and I stumbled on some helpful student success strategies that never quite saw the light of day, so I thought I’d share them here. These are my top 5 super easy and fun ways to engage students in a way that…