NPR recently reported that the Covid pandemic may have a lasting impact on our personalities. At the start of the semester, I was optimistic that our students would have a more normal college experience than they’d had these past three years. While many signals of normalcy are reappearing on campus, all is not well. To […]
I’ve had the good fortune of doing several classroom visits recently, and it is always inspiring to see the work my colleagues are doing. A question I often get asked after a classroom visit is about approaches that a professor can study in order to renew or advance their practice. One of the most well-known […]
In a previous post, I offered some initial reflections on feelings of overwhelm I am noticing in students, colleagues, and myself. Recently, Inside Higher Ed released a report by Kristi DePaul called “The Engaged (and Supported) Professor.” The report itself is sobering, but also likely not surprising to anyone who has been teaching through the […]
This semester, I am teaching a course on what schools can do to support the mental health and social-emotional well-being of students. We recently finished discussing The Age of Overwhelm and are in the middle of Set Boundaries, Find Peace. I believe my students are taking away a lot from these readings. Students are more […]
Several years ago, the AAC&U published a list of high-impact practices that lead to increased student engagement and learning. Here is the list of their 11 high-impact practices First-year seminars Common intellectual experiences Learning communities Writing-intensive courses Collaborative projects Undergraduate research Diversity and global learning Service learning Internships Capstone projects Reflective e-portfolios As you will […]
Tomorrow (9/23) I will host a discussion on a new grant program I am initiating as the CITA director. The goal of the grant is to encourage SLU faculty to write about their teaching practice or write about ways that their scholarship and creative work intersect with their teaching. An ideal that many of us at […]
In this post, I want to explore connections between departmental assessment projects and teaching excellence. I do this because I think it is easy to feel that the departmental assessment projects we are asked to do are disconnected from the things we care most deeply about. Too often, we may not see the ways that […]
In my previous post, I mentioned a strategy I recently used because I worried my class was getting into a slump. Almost every class will have these. Some are predictable–when the campus has a major event over the weekend, or when a break is approaching–but others are more difficult to anticipate. Regardless, good teachers develop […]
The semester has become very real for students. Managing a more active post-Covid social life with a full academic (and athletic) schedule has led many students to feel overwhelmed. While it can be frustrating to stand in front of a group of students who seem tired and who may have put your class down their […]
In recent years, teachers at the k-12 level have embraced Carol Dweck’s pathbreaking work on cultivating a growth mindset in students. Put too simply, a growth mindset is contrasted with a fixed mindset, or the idea that some of us are naturally good at certain fields of study–a “math person” or an “art person”–while others […]