Articles

Dealing with Students Who Test Your Patience

Difficult students are a potential problem for every faculty member. This is why it’s important to learn ways to deal with inappropriate or disruptive student behavior. In an email interview with The Teaching Professor, Brian Van Brunt, director of the Counseling and Testing at Western Kentucky University, and Perry Francis, professor of counseling at Eastern Michigan University, addressed some of the key issues involving these types of students.

Rob Kelly July 19, 2011

Help Students Develop Lifelong Learning Skills with Web 2.0 Tools

A University of Colorado at Denver student in Joni Dunlap’s learning design course has a question about embedding music into a slideshow presentation for an assignment he was working on. He tweets about it and immediately hears back from people in the community of practice who offer resources that help him quickly complete the task.

Mary Bart July 18, 2011

A Learner-Centered Approach Affects Student Motivation

Most of the time research evidence grows by bits and pieces—not all at once, and the evidence documenting the effectiveness of learner-centered approaches is no exception. It continues to accumulate, as illustrated by this study. It occurred in a third-year pharmacotherapy course in a doctor of pharmacy program. The students were randomly assigned to five- and six-member groups, with each group being assigned a patient case with multiple drug-related problems.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 15, 2011

How to Win Students and Influence Learning

An intense couple of days at this year’s Teaching Professor Conference inspired me to revamp my course, and I’m starting at the very beginning. My goal is to set the perfect tone to inspire and engage as soon as students walk through my door. I’m taking the Dale Carnegie approach to people and applying that to the classroom. “There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything,” Carnegie writes. “Just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.”

Ellen Smyth July 13, 2011

How Do You Engage Your Students? More Tips from Conference Attendees

As we mentioned in the June 28 and July 5 posts, during the opening keynote at The Teaching Professor Conference, Elizabeth F. Barkley, a professor

Mary Bart July 12, 2011

Creating a Campus Culture That Values Assessment

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that resistance to educational assessment comes from almost as many different sources as there are assessment tools, but in the end the reasons usually all boil down to three main issues:

Lack of understanding of the value and importance of assessment
Lack of resources to engage in assessment
Fear of change and risk taking

Mary Bart July 11, 2011

Digital Storytelling Can Help Boost Student Learning

Storytelling is the oldest form of education. The cave dwellers first taught their children lessons through stories. The Greeks picked up on the tradition by

John Orlando, PhD July 8, 2011

Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design

Much of what passes for an “online course” these days could more accurately be described as the electronic version of class hand-outs. These courses usually consist of a course description, a syllabus, lecture notes, reading lists, and assignment checklists. In other words, whatever materials a student might have viewed on paper in the past are now read onscreen, and whatever presentations a student might have watched in the classroom are now observed on their screen.

Elizabeth St. Germain July 6, 2011

More Tips on Active Learning

As we mentioned in the June 28 post, during the opening keynote at The Teaching Professor Conference, Elizabeth F. Barkley, a professor at Foothill College

Mary Bart July 5, 2011

Alternative Writing Assignments: The Integrated Paper

As faculty working with students to explore topics of interests we frequently request that they review the literature to gain an understanding of what is known and unknown about a topic and then present their findings in an integrated manner. While many students are familiar with developing papers termed “literature reviews” or “reviews of the literature,” these types of papers frequently do not afford the students the opportunity to integrate what has been found. Thus faculty have begun to require that students present their findings and thoughts via what is known as an “integrated paper format.”

Genevieve Pinto Zipp June 29, 2011

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