Top 17 of 2017: Our Most Popular Teaching and Learning Articles

As another year draws to a close, the editorial team at Faculty Focus looks back on some of the most popular articles of the year. Throughout 2017, we published more than 200 articles, covering a wide range of teaching and learning topics, including assignment strategies, cell phone policies, course design, flipped classrooms, online discussions, study strategies, and grading policies.

In this, our last post of the year, we reveal the top 17 articles for 2017. Each article’s ranking is based on a combination of factors, including e-newsletter open and click rates, social shares, reader comments, web traffic, reprint requests, and other reader engagement metrics.

Continue ReadingTop 17 of 2017: Our Most Popular Teaching and Learning Articles

Priceless Gift Exchanges between Faculty and Students

Teachers and students can give each other priceless gifts. “Professor Jones changed my life!” The comment is usually followed by the story of a teacher in love with content, students, and learning. How many times have I told the story of my advisor who was the first person to suggest I could be a college professor? We love to hear and tell these stories because they are remarkable and inspiring. A student and a teacher connect during one small segment of the student’s life, yet through that tiny window of time can blow a gust strong enough to change the direction of that life.

Continue ReadingPriceless Gift Exchanges between Faculty and Students

Meaningful Learning through One-on-One Conferences

Graduate students frequently get the chance to meet one-on-one with their professors. Yet at the undergraduate level, especially during the first year, students rarely get that chance, unless they take the initiative to come to office hours or schedule a meeting. This is unfortunate. I teach first-year writing, and at least once every semester, I meet one-on-one with each of my students, usually to review a draft of their first paper. My students love these conferences, partly because they offer a chance for personal contact with their instructor, and partly because the conferences provide them with uniquely meaningful feedback.

Continue ReadingMeaningful Learning through One-on-One Conferences

But What If They Cheat? Giving Non-Proctored Online Assessments

As online education continues to grow, so does the potential for academic dishonesty. So how do you ensure your online students are not cheating on their tests? Bottom line, you don’t. But there are ways to stack the deck in your favor. The good news is it’s not as bad as you think. A 2002 study by Grijalva, Kerkvliet, and Nowell it found that “academic dishonesty in a single online class is no more prevalent than in traditional classrooms” (Paullet, Chawdhry, Douglas & Pinchot, 2016, pg. 46). Although the offenders have become quite creative in their endeavors, the prevention remains the best defense.

Continue ReadingBut What If They Cheat? Giving Non-Proctored Online Assessments

Tulips, Tinfoil, and Teaching

I continue to be a huge fan of personal narratives, those accounts of teaching experiences from which the author and the reader learn much. They’re scholarly, thoughtful, and intellectual. They may start with “here’s what happened to me” but that launchpad rockets the author and reader to reflection, analysis, critique, and new worlds of understanding. These pieces of scholarship are good reading, even at the end of a long day. I strongly believe that our literature on teaching and learning is being impoverished by the reluctance of so many periodicals to publish these personal narratives.

Continue ReadingTulips, Tinfoil, and Teaching

Reliable Sources: Promoting Critical Thinking in the [Mis]information Age

Information cannot always be trusted. Despite popular opinion regarding the devastating impact of the Internet on the modern age, the inherent untrustworthiness of information is not new. Satire, misinformation, and disinformation have been circulating for centuries, even long before the printed word. However, thanks to the relative ease of creating and sharing content online, our students are confronted with publications created solely to entertain, persuade, and incite via incorrect or incomplete statistics.

Continue ReadingReliable Sources: Promoting Critical Thinking in the [Mis]information Age

Benefits of Giving Students Choices

We already do give students some choices. We let them choose paper topics, decide what to do for group projects, select subjects for artwork—and we’ve seen them struggle to make those choices. Most students don’t see selecting content as an opportunity to explore an area of interest, but rather an added burden of now trying to figure out what the teacher wants.

Continue ReadingBenefits of Giving Students Choices

Teaching Adult Students with Considerable Professional Expertise

Trends toward increased enrollment of non-traditional students are expected to continue (Stringer, 2015). Discussions about nontraditional college students often highlight some of the challenges our adult students face, such as balancing work, family, and school commitments, overcoming previous academic patterns that no longer serve them, and adapting to new approaches to learning (such as online classes.) The flip side, though, is that many non-traditional students bring a wealth of personal and professional experience to their pursuit of a new degree, which serves to the benefit their academic cohort (Stringer, 2015).

Continue ReadingTeaching Adult Students with Considerable Professional Expertise

Teaching Students the Importance of Professionalism

In almost a decade of teaching, I find myself lamenting that I still have to remind students to arrive on time, bring the proper materials, and pay attention to lectures. Despite admonitions and penalizing grades, students still use cellphones, do the bare minimum to pass an assignment, and struggle with constructive criticism. I often worry, how will they ever succeed in a professional workplace with these behaviors? So when my college introduced extracurricular workshops to help students develop professional behavior, I decided to go one step further and incorporate professionalism into all my courses.

Continue ReadingTeaching Students the Importance of Professionalism

Examining the Unexamined: Why Do Students Procrastinate?

“Even with years of teaching experience since then [grad school TA experience], there were still areas of my pedagogy that remained as they always had been—unexamined and essentially running on autopilot.” So writes Kevin Gannon in an excellent piece on redesigning his exams (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2017). I appreciate the honesty of his admission and suspect it resonates with many of us. Some of what’s unexamined in the practice of many faculty are what seem like intractable problems—say cramming and procrastination. Students have procrastinated for decades—some of us did when we were students and a few (?) of us still do. It’s a perennial problem for anyone who teaches, there can’t possibly be a solution or someone would have come up with it by now. In fact, that was basically the conclusion of a colleague who wrote to me recently. “My students procrastinate. It compromises the quality of their work and diminishes what they learn, but I’ve come to accept it as a given.”

Continue ReadingExamining the Unexamined: Why Do Students Procrastinate?