2 More Discussion—Less Lecture
Successful discussion in class depends on students having read and thought about course material before they arrive in class. CAPs( course preparation assignments) are the vehicle Yamane uses to get students engaged with course material before class.
3 Things I Will and Won’t Miss
I am just about to retire from Penn State and leave my faculty position teaching undergraduates. I’ll still be working; there’s this newsletter to edit and a world of faculty who still need advice, ideas, and encouragement to do their very best in the classroom. But you don’t end 33 years of college teaching without thinking about those things that will and won’t be missed on campus.
4 Three-Option Feedback
The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is useful feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. This approach contains some good, practical ideas that might benefit faculty, even those who already use other assessment methods to obtain student feedback.
5 The End of the Course: Another Perspective
The importance of wrapping up the course in the final class with exercises and/or discussion that causes the students to reflect on what they have learned. I agree with the authors’ basic premise, but the reality of my teaching situation seems to preclude use of the last class for their suggested exercises.
6 Use ‘Stuff Happens’ Cards to Handle Student Excu
Students and excuses seem to go hand in hand. Sometimes the excuses result from real events and personal problems that legitimately prevent a student from being in class, completing an assignment on time, or doing what some other policy or procedure may stipulate. Not having the wisdom of Solomon, most faculty struggle to fairly adjudicate between the real and unreal reasons offered for noncompliance.
7 Frequent Exams: Better Results for Students
It’s not a new finding: in general, more exams means better scores for students. But it’s nice to keep having the finding confirmed and to have yet another specific example of those better results.
8 Where Students Sit: A Rejoinder
It reported results analyzing the effects of assigned seating in a large physics course. The results were of special note because even though the students were randomly assigned seats, where they sat was still strongly correlated with their grades. Students in the back not only got lower grades, they had poorer attendance and less positive attitudes about physics. Steven Kalinowski and Mark Taper (reference below) were troubled by those results. They decided to see if the results held true for a 200-level biology course for majors.
9 The Benefits of Music and Stretching in Maintainin
Given how students fidget during lectures and the popularity of personal music devices, it sometimes seems that students would much rather hear music and move around than listen to a professor. Our solution is simple and direct—we encourage them to do both!
10 Conditions Associated with Classroom Conflict
Faculty researchers (reference below) wondered whether characteristics of courses and instructors might be associated with conflict. They also wondered whether instructors’ preparation and caring attitude toward students related to the presence or absence of students’ disruptive behaviors. And they were curious as to how instructors went about resolving conflict and whether they perceived the techniques they used as being successful.
