Center for Innovative Pedagogy

It seems like everyone I talk to has well more than 3 months' worth of "summer projects." We talk about our overstuffed schedules. We even complain about depth vs. breadth and "coverage" in our courses and majors. Maybe the summer's not a bad time to consider a little productive surrender.

Asking students to report their confidence in an answer is a way to get them to reflect on their own learning, and gives you a window on where understanding and error may lie.

Provocative questions from Rick Godden and Anne-Marie Womack regarding recent studies about the benefits of paper-and-pen notetaking and resulting calls for screen bans in classrooms. "Are people with disabilities, then, doomed to substandard learning?"

"Technology is a part of our human experience, not a replacement to it."

I've heard (and said) that small humanities classes already are "flipped", but Derek Bruff gives some examples which show that a lit class can still be flipped. Even close reading and response writing "can benefit from what Helen Shin calls "shared temporal, spatial, and cognitive presence.""

"Both fishing and teaching are unsolvable puzzles." Are there lessons you can bring to teaching from your hobbies?

Some interesting thoughts about what makes grading a chore, and what can make it rewarding.

Some interesting examples here of times when annoying classroom behaviors can be symptoms of issues with a student's wellbeing, and a few ideas of ways we can help students cope without just abandoning rigor. "Too often when faculty discuss students with mental-health conditions, the conversation ends in the same place: Either we establish rigorous standards or we coddle students. But that is a false binary."

Terrific podcast discussion reviewing the body of literature on course evaluations. Did you know it's one of the deepest areas of research in the scholarship of teaching and learning?

Fascinating examples of ways that a shared spreadsheet, thrown up on a projector, can be used to manage group work, record ideas from class conversation, and develop arguments and the use of evidence.

"Students select or reject majors based in large part on the quality of the first college instructor they have in the discipline, new research finds."

Kenyon folks may appreciate Ed Burger's comments in this podcast about the tidyness of our campuses and the messiness of the learning process.

There's some interesting potential for a "big data" approach to publishing syllabi.

One way to get students thinking about privacy issues is to put them in control of publishing their own work.

One administrative reaction to increasing computer use in the classroom is to try and lock down the computers tighter. There's something to this, in terms of protecting a group resource - but it can also create a distracting challenge for students who just want their school iPad to work like their home one does. Sometimes trust and active supervision work better than technical lockdowns!

Michael Feldstein says that "there is a moral imperative to protect students' privacy" - but then rightly questions whether we're "protecting" privacy by taking choices away from students.

There are many benefits to having students present work in public. How do you engage students with the issues of privacy and public representation around that work?

I noticed a number of tables at yesterday's Celebration of High Impact Practices where students were displaying their work on small laptop screens. How can we improve this experience for the next celebration - and what other venues for showcasing student work could we be using?

The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy gives a higher priority to understanding how knowledge is produced and shared. This article discusses ways that could play out in the design of library services. How could it affect your course and curriculum design?

Good podcast episode running down a variety of significant findings in the scholarship of teaching and learning.