Teaching

What teaching writing and defeating nascent fascism have in common.

responding to individual student challenges early in the school year

The two notebook pages below capture the miracle of the human brain, and the power of dedicated, effortful learning. During some recent housecleaning, I found the first one, dating from the days I came home from the hospital after a heart transplant and surgery-induced stroke. I had lost the ability to write and speak. These were some of my first efforts to form letters again. That was three and a half years ago. As my body and brain healed, and the words came back, I decided to rekindle my love of languages, and began re-learning ancient Greek (which I had studied in high school and college). Every morning this summer I have been getting up early, making a cup of tea, and studying Greek for thirty minutes. I review vocabulary, read my textbook, translate practice sentences, and write out verb conjugations and noun declensions to affix them in my memory. You see a recent effort at this on the notebook page on the right. Repetitive work sometimes, yes, but I see its unquestionable results when I am faced with translating an unfamiliar sentence. Let me never forget what gifts learning--even when it has been difficult, monotonous, and repetitive--has brought me, and continues to bring me at the start of every day. In the coming academic year, what are the challenging tasks that will motivate and guide us--and our students--from wherever we are now to whatever we hope to achieve? #learning #teaching #joy

Designing courses for success in the year to come

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. We’re back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries! The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are… Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the Univer…

Speakers: Carolyn Ives, Shaun Longstreet, Paul Martin

On alt grading research, justice and equity, and liking student writing

This is a user manual video that I created in Clips, based on Professor Joe Musicco's 2019 Lilly Conference presentation, "Forget the Syllabus: Why We All Ne...

The Critical Thinking Matrix #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/78031 This interesting table dates from 2015 and draws from Peter Facione's 1990 'cognitive skills' (p. 12 or 15) and Thomas Kuhn's 1977 account of epistemic values (as extracted in a 1-page paywalled article by Linda Elder and Richard Paul). And the inclusion of 'self-regulation' as an epistemic value is something I would want to think about a lot more.

Please see below for the links to the slides and handout (with references and script) for my talk at The Grading Conference 2025 on June 11, 2025. Title: Tolerance for Error: A theory of how (some)…

Professor Sam Illingworth is a Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University in the UK. His work and research focus on using poetry and games to develop dialogue between different audiences.

A sense of belonging is particularly valuable in higher education, where feeling valued, respected and part of a community are connected to students’ academic achievement, retention and well-being. But belonging resists clear definition, both what it is and how it relates to other concepts such as inclusion and mattering. This is especially true in a post-pandemic world, where online learning and the digital transformation have blurred the boundaries of university life. For this episode of the Campus podcast, we speak to Karen Gravett, who is an associate professor in higher education and associate head of research in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey. Her research covers belonging, digital education, student engagement, relational pedagogies and literacy practices. As part of the Belonging to and beyond the Digital university project, Karen (working with Rola Ajjawi of Deakin University and Sarah O’Shea from Charles Sturt University) asked students what belonging means to them,…

The most common rookie (and not-so-rookie) mistakes with alternative grading

Are your students motivated by opportunity or fearful of scarcity?

There are lots of problems with student evaluations of teaching. Among them: timing.

10 Recommended Citations on the Science of Learning Curated by Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D., Cognitive Scientist, Educator, & Book Author Visit retrievalpractice.org/citations and retrievalpractice.org/scientists for more information Retrieval Practice Agarwal, P. K., Nunes, L. D., & Blunt, J. R...

Reading & Meeting Schedule 📅 Date 📖 Reading 💻 Zoom Info Tuesday, 3 June 5:00-6:00 p.m. (EST) Intro & Ch. 1-5 pgs. 1-73 https://tinyurl.com/MoreThanWords-June Tuesday, 17 June 5:00-6:00 p.m. (EST) Ch. 6-10 pgs. 75-131 https://tinyurl.com/MoreThanWords-June Tuesday, 22 Jul...

The evolving landscape of academic integrity calls for a shift from traditional plagiarism detection toward a post-plagiarism approach that treats students as partners. This framework emphasizes co…

New paper shows that learning style labels create harmful educational hierarchies

On Wednesday June April 23, 2025 I participated in the 9 in 9 in overtime UDL webinar series which was organized by Goodwin University. I wanted to make my materials available so I have provided li…

Getting students to actively engage in class discussions is a common challenge, but group exercises can help both new and experienced instructors accomplish just that.

The history scholar explains why it matters that there’s been a spike in students graduating with Latin honors.

What I learned by moving to a test-forward approach