What the Best College Teachers Do is perhaps the most important book I’ve ever read.

A ceramics teacher once split her students into two groups.

I had the good fortune to meet her in a UDL course for higher Ed educators and her final project dazzled me and left me wanting to know more about her use of conversational quizzes in her course. I also wanted to get the word out to others who may see this as a useful tool in their teaching toolbox.

Four ways to nurture academic well-being in these uniquely challenging times.

I’ve been teaching—with kids and adults, in schools and online—since 2005. But not this academic year. As the new year starts, ten provocations about education are on my mind. Perhaps one wil…

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

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,…

David Gooblar, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Simple videos? The hard part is actually getting the confidence to talk on camera. Check out the whole series! New videos posted every week.E1: 10 Tips Beyo...

Try these for your workshops or classes

Curious about teaching curiosity? Here's my talk from U of Waterloo on curiosity as a practice we can develop.