Center for Innovative Pedagogy

Perhaps the biggest outcome of a liberal arts education should be the understanding that every discipline is more based on learned and practiced skills than innate aptitude. The four tips in this article might be boiled down to one umbrella concept - talk to your students about growth mindset.

This is an interesting discussion about vulnerability, trust, and power in the classroom (and outside it). It comes from the Connected Courses community, which focuses on teaching courses with a large public online component, but the discussion is applicable to any class where students are asked to take risks. It's an hour long, but well worth it. (It's also an interesting case study in bringing material from the backchannel into the foreground.)

Interesting analyses of the appeals court reversal of the decision in the Georgia State University case on electronic reserves. Multiple analysts find that the higher court did affirm significant parts of the decision which expand fair use.

An extensive review of 51 years of scholarly literature on student participation. Thanks to Michael Levine and Irene Lopez for pointing this out.

Multiple Kenyon faculty have assigned Wikipedia article creation as class projects, or participated in scholarly "write-ins" to expand Wikipedia's coverage in a targeted area.

The author argues for thinking of students as a vehicle for communicating core course content (not just the related material which is most often covered in student presentations). He has two reasons - student presenters do not have "expert blind spots", and peer-to-peer interaction has a differently engaging dynamic.

The author argues for thinking of students as a vehicle for communicating core course content (not just the related material which is most often covered in student presentations). He has two reasons - student presenters do not have "expert blind spots", and peer-to-peer interaction has a differently engaging dynamic.

Lecture gets a bad rap for not being sufficiently active learning, but when is it actually the best tool for the job? The comments on this article also contain some good points.

Interesting advice from Kathy Sierra arguing that the point of a presentation is to do something for the audience, not for yourself. Might be a useful reading for getting some students (and faculty and staff?) past stage fright.

A list of 10 points to remember in helping students in crisis. From The Guardian, the list uses UK terminology, but the points apply on both sides of the pond. I particularly like the bookends: "find out about the support services your university offers" and "lead by example and take care of yourself too."

A literature review on team teaching, including different approaches, benefits and requirements, and tips for success.

We're seeing increasing interest in video communication for class purposes, from bringing in guest lecturers or co-teachers, to connecting Kenyon students with other students around the globe, to coping with weather or illness. This is a good 2-page rundown of the idea from EDUCAUSE.

The examples of student-teacher interaction are particularly good in this white paper. I also liked the discussion about the classroom atmosphere that's encouraged (and discouraged) by handling questions well.

We've got a faculty colleague working on this idea this semester. Presentations will become podcasts, and class time which used to be spent on presentations will now become a longer Q&A discussion of the topics. We're hoping this will mitigate some student issues with stage fright, and allow for better discussions since the students will have more time to prepare meaningful questions.

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education provides a resource center full of materials related to ecological sustainability on campus, including resources for classes which address sustainability.

This will be an interesting topic to watch. How can we help students learn the habits of complex thinking, and unlearn the habits of shallow thinking? If the best practices of effective study become automatic, the student will be more able to focus on new ideas.

The idea of "project-based learning" is appealing to many people, but open-ended group inquiry also carries a number of risks. This article makes a number of suggestions for ways PBL can be improved.

What exercises do you use to help students develop their abilities to engage points of view with which they may not agree?

For better or for worse, email is a vital communication channel in Kenyon's culture, but not in pre-college teenage culture. How do you address this gap?

This paper makes explicit a number of the implicit beliefs Kenyon faculty seem to have about essay exams. The tips on question selection and grading might be particularly helpful.

Infographic creation tools let students explore data in different ways, think about different ways to present that data to make an argument, and become more critical consumers of the glossy charts and graphs which are increasing in our media.