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Curating your own portfolio can be a valuable metacognitive exercise, helping students cement their learning and plan for the future. Or it can be an exercise in checking off boxes. Which sounds like a better use of student time and tuition dollars?

Do you contact your students before the semester starts?

"One of my biggest regrets as a teacher of writing is that for many years, I didn't make students write enough." John Warner argues for changes in course designs to give students a lot more practice with shorter writing formats.

The student who isn't pulling their weight (and even the fear of that student) can be a major obstacle for group work. This article has some concrete tips for reducing the ability of a group member to coast. I particularly like the options which encourage you to prioritize and teach group process.

"Can "light-touch, targeted feedback" to students via email improve their perceptions of and performance in a class? New research says in some cases the answer is yes."

Great news about student resistance to active learning. Have the courage of your convictions!

"The historian Kevin Gannon has written about the notion that teaching is an act of "radical hope," and nothing brings out that notion more than envisioning how you might have affected the lives of your students 20 years after they have left your classroom."

You may know Michael Wesch from his videos "The Machine is Us/ing Us" or "What Baby George and Handstands Taught Me". In this interview he talks about his next project, a podcast series which will present ethnographic participant-observations of student life, with the goal of deeper understanding of student life.

One of the interesting findings in the literature on academic honesty is that specific policies or processes appear less important than having a visible campus conversation about the value and purpose of being honest. This memo might be an interesting starting point for having that conversation with your students.

Now is the right time to engage students in discussion about what is and isn't cheating. Stress and bad scheduling can lead some students to make wrong choices at the end of the semester; a reminder about some of these "grey area" issues might save a lot of heartache later.

I particularly like the way points 2 and 5 address the need to have students practice public speaking _before_ the end of the semester.

What do you do to convince students to study the hard way instead of the easy way? Or what do you do in your course design to make the hard way look easy?

"Just to have someone from the university come up and say, 'You belong here' and 'We're so excited to have you here,' " (a first-generation student) says, "that would have changed everything for me."

Terrific podcast review of research about the importance of teacher-student relationships on student achievement.

Might be a good template for communicating with your students about preparing for the end of the year.

"The value in feedback from students lies in considering the centrality of experience." The author applies John Locke's concept of "primary" (i.e. objective) and "secondary" (i.e. subjective) qualities to course evaluations.

An English professor presents three activities designed from a strategy of disruptive pedagogy. In order to break students out of their accustomed digital isolation, the professor introduces elements of social discomfort into the classroom. In extreme cases, he surprises students with pizza to keep them on their toes.

I hear a lot of concern about our students being "fragile", and there's a lot of good effort put into helping them learn to "cope." But what are the things which we could change - in our classrooms, in our campus culture - to promote good mental health?

There's a survey instrument attached which you can use to have students reflect and report on how they study for exams. They can then ask themselves if their approach is working - or you could tally the data and tell them which approaches are being used by the students getting the best grades.

End-of-semester student presentations coming up? Might be worthwhile to share this with your students to help them prepare.