Higher Education Best Practices - Teaching & Learning from the NEA
What we can learn from the research on college teaching.
The latest NEA Thriving in Academe guide explores teaching and learning scholarship, and how it can play a role in faculty's ongoing work as teacher-scholar. Are you a model teacher? Being a model teacher is within your, and everyone else’s, grasp. Interactive Lecturing Find the middle ground between active learning and lecturing. Small Teaching from the Science of Learning Small changes to your teaching, implemented tomorrow morning, can improve student learning in your courses. Get Their Attention Have you ever faced disengaged, unfocused students? It’s frustrating, right? Learn how to get their learning back on track. Teaching Creative Thinking Have you figured out how to teach your students the most important skill for the 21st century? Here is a new teacher-learner paradigm that goes beyond active learning. The Three D's How to effectively use three styles of teaching: directing, discussing, and delegating in the college classroom. Giving Good Feedback To learn, students must receive high-qualify feedback But who has the time for that? Find out how to provide the feedback students need without burning out. Deep Learning If you've decided that the real purpose of higher education is to instill deep learning, check out this Thriving in Academe to find out how to make your students what you desire to see — deep learners. Getting Students to Do the Readings Few things are more frustrating to a college teacher than to begin a discussion of the readings assigned during a previous class and discover that a significant number of students haven’t done the readings. This issue’s Thriving in Academe offers encouraging news: There are classroom strategies for ensuring that students keep up with class readings—and students actually welcome them. Helping Students Embrace Deep Learning The concept that one size fits all doesn’t have much of a place in education since we’ve begun to understand better how brains work and people learn. This issue’s Thriving in Academe author suggests ways instructors can use the Kolb Learning Style Index to identify their own cognitive processing preferences and those of their students. From this knowledge they can develop more effective teaching strategies. Meet Your Students Where They Are: Social Media We're used to engaging students in the real world, now it's time to engage them in social online spaces like Facebook and Twitter. Online social networking has become an integral space for many of our students to live out their daily personal interactions. So what's an ethical instructor to do? Leverage this new media to meet your needs and those of your students. The Multiple Roles of the College Professor If you listen to the pundits and politicians criticizing higher education, you would think that instructors on our nation’s campuses do hardly any work and that the little they do accomplish is irrelevant. To change this perception, this issue’s Thriving in Academe authors argue, the faculty needs to do a better job demonstrating that our profession is highly specialized, requiring multiple sets of high-level skills. Rethinking Expectations About Assignments It's frustrating for professors when students haven't done their out-of-class assignment. Too often, the students just don't take their homework seriously. But there's hope for frustrated professors, this issue's Thriving in Academe authors claim. Make sure your students know why the assignment is important and try to connect it to their lives. |