Category Archives: Pedagogy

Small Steps, Big Impact: Micro Experiments in Teaching
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Small Steps, Big Impact: Micro Experiments in Teaching

Our students are changing…and so should our teaching

I think we are all finding our long-held assumptions about how to create an assessment with safeguards against cheating, “make” students do the weekly readings, and engage students either online or in-person are increasingly proving to disappoint.  Our students are changing and evolving. Jenny Darroch’s Inside Higher Ed “Students Are Less Engaged; Stop Blaming COVID”, asks us to reframe college students as “knowledge workers.”  Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge work” in 1959.  He identified six factors that motivate “knowledge workers” to be productive, including a sense of autonomy, opportunities for continuous learning, and an emphasis on quality of work vs quantity.  We need to adapt our teaching and learning strategies, but how do we know what is going to work?   Continue reading →

Turning Deadlines From Enemies to Energizers
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Turning Deadlines From Enemies Into Energizers

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga discuss combining intrinsic motivation strategies with extrinsic motivators that have come under scrutiny, like deadlines, grades, and punitive course policies. 

These recommendations speak to the moment many educators find themselves in: We’re no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, where instructors and students are doing the best they can amidst historically challenging circumstances that necessitated changes to many educational norms. Now, we’re grappling with a gray area that’s just as challenging, as we try to decide which educational norms need to be reinstated and which “pandemic lessons” should be integrated into our practice moving forward.

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A Meditation on AI and the Faculty Member

Once in a while, something new appears that monumentally changes the way we as a society do things. It is met with a mixture of fascination and panic, as some wholeheartedly embrace it, while others see the end times coming. 

For many years, we have seen warnings about artificial intelligence: what could happen if it went wrong somehow? What if the machines started to replace us or took control? What about our jobs, our careers, our lives? 

That question is being answered, as of last November. Sometimes AI is used for good and sometimes not. But there is no question—it’s here to stay. Continue reading →

Revamping Office Hours

I have a hard time getting students to come to my office hours. When I do have one-on-one conversations with students outside of class, they almost always feel like a breakthrough of some sort, especially when meeting with my online students that I rarely chat with synchronously. As I start to wrap up this quarter at DePaul and make my inevitable list of all the things I want to do differently next quarter, I’m looking for ways to see more students during my office hours. 

I’m not the only one trying to figure this out. Derek Bruff and Beckie Supiano reference the same study led by Jeremy L. Hsu at Chapman University. In Spring 2021, Hsu and his team surveyed 500+ STEM students and 28 instructors to figure out what they think about office hours. Students and instructors both identified “Ask questions or review material, including going more in depth into related concepts” as the top reason to use office hours. 

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A classroom full of blue students with one red student under a spotlight.
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Teaching and Learning While Black

When I was a junior in high school, a classmate who sat next to me in AP U.S. History told me that I needed to be “smart” to get into the University of Maryland. While sitting in the same AP class, this confused me, but I knew why she made this statement because I had been navigating white educational spaces since I was in the 6th grade. This was not the first microaggression that I experienced in these spaces and certainly would not be my last. But in that moment, it reinforced to me that teaching and learning while Black would always be a different experience for people that looked like me.  Continue reading →

How to Build Community in Your Class Without Using Icebreakers

How to Build Community In Your Class Without Using Icebreakers

Research has shown that college students who find a support community in the first 6 weeks of college are more likely to persist and complete their education (Woosley, 2003). Much of this community can be found and created outside of the classroom through co-curricular involvement, however, faculty are in a unique position to influence the success of their students. For example, a 2021 study found that students who felt a sense of belonging in their STEM program were more likely to persist to their second year (Garza et al.).
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Teaching in Tough Times: How to Counter Languishing and Burnout in Higher Education. An image of a match burning down then becoming a seedling.
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Teaching in Tough Times: How to Counter Languishing and Burnout in Higher Education

A quick note before I move into the post–if you find that your feelings run deeper than just your work, or that the challenges you face are pervasive or problematic across other areas of your life, I would encourage you to seek professional counseling or therapy with a licensed mental health professional beyond the recommendations for approaching your work outlined below.

We all likely know the feeling by now, even if we might still lack the specific terminology to explain it. We’re tired, despite sleeping relatively well. We’re feeling “off,” but we’re not sick. We’re feeling lonely or disconnected, though we still get along with our coworkers and students. We may forget project details or course deadlines, or just find it hard to be excited about starting a new endeavor or covering topics in the classroom that once interested us. Is this burnout, or something else? Continue reading →

The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach
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The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach

One Small Change…

Iterative design isn’t a new concept. It’s been one of my favorite approaches to course development and teaching since my earliest days as an instructional designer. You probably do this in your teaching practice without even thinking – when you tweak something from one term to the next based on how an activity went, or how well students responded to a prompt.

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A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology
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A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology

When ChatGPT emerged last year, a segment of academia panicked in response to articles suggesting that students could get an AI to write their term paper and you, the instructor, would be none the wiser. Some are ready to write a eulogy for human authorship altogether. Continue reading →

Educational Technology Before and During the Pandemic

Educational Technology Before and During the Pandemic

Before becoming an instructional designer in 2015, I was a teacher in the K-12 industry for 14 years. I specialized in teaching 3rd and 4th-grade self-contained classes, as well as the middle school classes in the areas of language arts and social studies. Since 2001 until now, teaching practices have changed due to pedagogy and the integration of technology. Kamau Bobb of Google‘s dedication to educational research advances the field. We live in an ever-changing technological society that impacts our lives at home and in our careers. With this being said, many teachers want to keep abreast of the latest pedagogical practices and technology developments, but it can be challenging due to time constraints.

As I compare and contrast the instruction I received in my undergraduate years in the College of Education at ISU vs the instruction I now give to undergraduate students in the College of Education at DePaul, a lot of the foundation is the same, but now there is a wide focus on how to integrate technology properly into the curriculum. Continue reading →