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,…
I recently had a former student ask me how I stay motivated to work from home or coffee shops. I’m currently working from my laptop at the Panera down the street, so I thought now would be a good time to list 4 tips that are helping me stay focused at the moment: Focus on…
During the past few years that I’ve taught online, it’s been a lot of trial and error to figure out what schools and supervisors expect from online adjuncts. Generally, we get tossed into the online classroom without much guidance (and regardless of how long you’ve been doing this, different schools place value on different areas/assignments…
I don’t do this regularly (although I used to), but if you find yourself in a less than fantastic mood, I highly recommend this 10-15 minute exercise to get you out of your funk. Not to mention, it also helps you get more accomplished during your day (according to podcasters, authors, and famous entrepreneurs who…
Once in a while I like to include some simple quotes here on the Happy Professor blog. From past experience, I know that at some point throughout the next few years my once favorite quotes might be sadly forgotten (they tend to pile up on Post-Its, in notebooks that get discarded, and in various lists…
If you’re a teacher in elementary, middle, high school, or college, you may notice that the importance of certain classes often evolves with time. And while change is often important, we may not always be aware of the potentially negative consequences that follow. A few years ago, one of the schools I worked at was…
I went back to the classroom yesterday for the first time in a very very long time (for me, that means it’s been almost a year of fully online teaching). Oh, how I had missed every part of it. Printing out my class rosters, putting on actual clothes and makeup to leave the house, the…
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,…