Interactive Strategies for Engaging Large and Small Classes Alike

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–Faculty Focus

As faculty, our goal is to create an environment in which students are engaged with the material, while at the same time ensuring that they are prepared to advance in their studies. There are many techniques and tricks and pedagogies we can use—some requiring a lot of work, some requiring less, but perhaps one of the simplest is to simply get closer to students, moving around the room, and offering easy opportunities for them to talk to each other.

Lecture Instruction: Alive and Not So Well

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– Inside Higher Ed

New study of undergraduate STEM courses finds that lectures remain dominant — despite finding after finding questioning their effectiveness.

See the research paper published in the March 2018 issue of Science Magazine: Anatomy of STEM Teaching in North American Universities

Congratulations to Erin Sanders (CEILS), Blaire Van Valkenburgh (Life Sciences), Frank Laski (Life Sciences), Kevin Eagan (Education), Christopher Lee (Physical Sciences), and Marc Levis-Fitzgerald (OID) for their contributions to the largest-ever observational study of undergraduate STEM education.

Same Course, Different Ratings

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–Inside Higher Ed

A new study in PS: Political Science combines elements of prior research on gender bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs, and arrives at a serious conclusion: institutions using these evaluations in tenure, compensation and other personnel decisions may be engaging in gender discrimination. The study says students rate male instructors more highly than women, even when they’re teaching identical courses.

Is My Teaching Learner-Centered?

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To gauge what it means to be a learner-centered instructor, consider these questions. (READ MORE)

Characteristics of learner-centered teaching

  • Does the course contain activities that put students in positions to learn from and with each other?
  • Are students encouraged to discover things for themselves, or does the teacher usually tell them what they should know and do?
  • Are there policies and practices in the course that promote the development of autonomous, self-directed learning skills?
  • Is student input solicited on course topics, policies, assessment methods, and class activities?
  • Is collaboration emphasized more than competition in the course?
  • Is what’s being learned, why it’s being learned, and how it can be learned discussed more often than grades?
  • Are students voluntarily participating or do they sit silently until called on to answer questions and make comments? Does their nonverbal behavior indicate they’d rather not speak?
  • Do students talk more than the teacher during class discussions? Do students respond to each other or only to the teacher?
  • Is it a course where questions play a more prominent role than answers?
  • Are students being taught how to answer their own questions?
  • Are mistakes handled as learning opportunities for the teacher and the students?
  • Are skills like critical thinking and problem-solving taught explicitly?
  • Is the teacher modeling how expert learners handle problems, find answers, deal with failure, and celebrate success?
  • Are students being given the opportunity to develop self- and peer-assessment skills?
  • Do students have the chance to practice the principles of constructive feedback (when they provide input about the course and/or about the work of their peers)?
  • Do students regularly comment on evaluations that it was a course where they had to think? Or, was a course where they had to teach themselves (meaning the teacher held them responsible for learning)?