Center for Innovative Pedagogy

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?

How will you bring not only your own scholarship, but your own approach to doing scholarship, into your classes this semester?

Carol Dweck addresses some of the misconceptions and oversimplifications of her work on "growth mindset."

"In writing, as in learning, openings matter. Don't fritter them away." 4 ways you can use the opening of class to help students transition their attention into your course, from James Lang.

Jose Bowen, president of Goucher College and author of the book _Teaching Naked_, is starting a 5-part series on liberal arts education as the "degree of the future". In part one, I'd note the implied difference between "critical" and "creative" thinking.

Tips from Stephen Brookfield for planning and facilitating excellent classroom discussions.

Interesting studies on the double-edged sword of "resilience" in the face of discrimination.

Terrific example of the way your first day of class activities can act as an introduction (almost a "trailer") for the way you'll conduct the rest of the course.

Amusing idea for a class activity here - you can use Google Sheets and the website Flippity.com to run a quiz game. I've seen this implemented with PowerPoint decks, but this way looks a lot simpler.

Michael Wesch describes his steps in redesigning a course syllabus to make the Big Ideas of the course more obvious (and engaging) to students. I was particularly taken by the typographical element of putting the Big Ideas in his handwriting and the day-by-day details in type.

Very interesting podcast episode. Turnitin inspires some strong reactions. Some professors are intentional and creative in the way they integrate it with their writing pedagogy. Others raise a number of important ethical questions about they way the tool makes assumptions about your classroom environment.

Interesting and even-handed review of a site providing programming tutorials designed for academics in the humanities. Might be some interesting inspirations here for a winter break project!

Interesting ideas here about the value of requiring students to annotate their own work and the sources they consult. Note the point that these professors actually dedicate regular class time to the exercise.

The next step after the standing desk, perhaps? (Certainly I'd have a better chance keeping a desk that small clean...)

Many classes already use library materials (physical or online) as course readings. Have you looked, though, at the open textbooks and other instructional materials available in your field?

This study takes the novel approach of comparing course evaluations for courses and follow-up courses and finds that "teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with students' evaluations." Except for higher performing students, those who did better in follow up courses, indicating greater learning in the earlier courses, gave worse evaluations.

Course evaluations - everyone does them and nobody is happy with them. A Berkeley statistics professor writes a thorough and readable run-down of why student course evaluations are mostly worthless at measuring what they purport to measure - teaching effectiveness. He also offers useful suggestions for better methods of assessing courses, but they are time consuming.

We have some students using LiveScribe pens, so they can have the experience of taking notes by hand and the benefits of digitized notes and synchronized audio recordings.

It's important to reserve some time for reflection at the end of the semester, to review where you thought your classes were going and where they actually ended up. (But don't forget to review the positive too - what worked as or even better than expected?)

While aimed at younger students, these techniques for reading images and discussing the ways that some images become "iconic" are great prompts for college students as well.