Category: Teaching
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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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The power of nonverbals
Entertainers are known to be able to “read the room.” The same can be said for public speaking. Yet, do we think the same about educators? I believe that having my undergraduate degrees in education and journalism (from the Diederich College of Communication) afforded me the perfect mix of reading and adjusting to the room.…
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Contract grading and the role of professionalism
When you ask educators what one of the worst parts of their jobs is, they will usually respond with “grading.” While it doesn’t have to be the worst part of our jobs, it certainly can be. And for those of us in professions-focused departments, schools, and colleges, grading doesn’t seem to reflect the professional expectations…
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Building from the bare bones: Skeleton notes and lesson structure
Scaffolding learning for students is one of the best ways to get students from where they start to the place we want them to be at the end of a lesson, unit, or class. A way to do this is to use skeleton notes, also known as guided notes, to give students a structure for…
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“Explain Your Choice”: Metacognition as a form of reflection with student work
I’ve spent all my teaching career working with students on production skills–writing, design, audio, video, photo, social media, and others. And throughout the last decade+, I’ve wrestled with how best to (1) have students reflect thoughtfully on their production work, (2) integrate more metacognitive practices into my classroom, and (3) find more opportunities for students…
Patrick R. Johnson, MJE 