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Offering letters to our future selves
For those of us who were in school at the turn of the Millennium, creating time capsules was the highlight of the school year. Time capsules represent opportunities for us to think about who we were and are in the moment. My family remembers filling them for different significant moments in their elementary, middle, and…
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Four corners strategies: Using the room and movement to your advantage
When you first enter your classroom, what do you notice? Is it the location of all the exits, the types of seating, or the technology opportunities? Is it something else? Have you thought about the walls? This strategy helps us to use the corners in the room to help students to work through questions and…
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Generating buzz with buzz sessions
I don’t know about you, but sometimes a lesson is falling flat or students are struggling to bring the engagement for the day. So this quick post is a quick strategy to get them going again: Buzz Sessions. What it is: Students come together to generate ideas about a specific topic that are then used…
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Cased-based teaching to promote critical process thinking
There are two types of case study-focused teaching. The first is the common practice of using case studies for deeper and more nuanced thinking about larger topics using a specific case to illustrate it. The second, the subject of this post, is creating cases to highlight critical thinking, process-focused learning, and student growth. This approach…
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Read-around for peer feedback
Providing a space for meaningful peer feedback is often difficult, especially given students come to it with negative experiences in their minds. We probably also come to the planning of peer review with our own negativity bias. I have had my fair share of unfortunate experiences where I walked away feeling wasted time with zero…
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Quick-writes to bring it all back to you
(In case the headline doesn’t bring it all back to you, here’s the song that’s currently playing in my head that inspired it) Quick-writes, a cousin to free-writes, is a strategy that gives students a chance to dive back into an idea after a long break, bring forward ideas from the previous night’s reading, or…
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Teaching students Knowledge – Question – Response
Transforming learning is certainly not the easiest task, especially in larger lecture courses where there aren’t as many opportunities to provide more application of the information. One easy way to do this is to add Knowledge – Question – Response charts to your classes. They look like this: Knowledge (or Argument) Question Respnse Something the…
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Point-of-view thinking as a response activity
Helping students to translate academese to everyday-human language is often one of the foundational goals of our classes. Yet, there never seem to be a lot of strategies for higher education teachers to target that particular need. Here’s where point-of-view responses can help. What is it? The point-of-view strategy allows students to think like a…
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Having the safety conversation
I wasn’t sure if it would be okay to write this post this week, but instead of a teaching strategy linked to an instructional goal, I’ve decided to share a strategy that we can no longer go without considering. Following the fatal shooting on Michigan State’s campus last week and having friends who teach at…
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Early reflection and feedback on teaching and learning
We all love to complain about those end-of-term student evaluations. And while there are undoubtedly problematic pieces, we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes. How do we avoid those numeric surprises (or disappointments) linked to job performance? Well, we integrate early reflections on teaching and learning–that’s how. It is becoming common for instructors to add…
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Patrick R. Johnson, Ph.D., MJE 