Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

collaborative learning

students working on group assignment

My Students Don’t Like Group Work

Students don’t always like working in groups. Ann Taylor, an associate professor of chemistry at Wabash College, had a class that was particularly vocal in their opposition. She asked for their top 10 reasons why students don’t want to work in groups and they offered this list (which I’ve edited slightly).

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University of Mississippi students

What Happened When I Stopped Lecturing

Any course in ethics demands a high degree of student engagement and discussion as students wrestle with ethical dilemmas presented in case studies and real-life situations. Without discussion, an ethics class becomes a lecture on ethical systems and viewpoints from which students must infer their own positions from values that might not align with their moral outlook.

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peer learning

The Benefits of Peer Learning

Three articles in the February issue of the Teaching Professor newsletter deal with peer learning—a large category that includes activities through which students learn from and with each other. Peer learning gets troublesome for many faculty due to the idea that students are teaching each other. Isn’t that our job? Students aren’t paying all those tuition dollars to learn from other students and they aren’t shy about saying as much. Students are paying to be taught by experts. If we’re not the ones teaching, we sometimes feel guilty.

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