Center for Innovative Pedagogy

If true peer review of student writing seems to take too much time, and you've noticed that students are reluctant to assign each other bad grades, maybe peer ranking provides a useful middle ground.

It seems like this article raises as many questions as it answers. The first, of course, is whether the CIP is doing enough to provide the elements which do support deep change. But I think we also have to ask, if incentives don't produce deep change, what do they support and is that enough?

Might be useful to share this interactive guide to distributed practice with your students!

The authors describe a method for teaching writing skills with a mixture of assignment scaffolding and peer review of the stages of the writing project.

Interested in tools that make course content more accessible to students with visual and cognitive challenges? Two free Microsoft products features their Immersive Reader tool, which reads aloud text for users.

Asking students to do work in public can lead to powerful learning, but we should talk to students about how it impacts their work and public identity. In this blog post, Jade Davis gives a description of the readings and release forms she uses in her classes with digital media projects.

How can you write test questions which both assess learning and promote it?

"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."

How do joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire play out in your classes? (This is from the GLCA/GLAA Center for Teaching and Learning, which solicits your contributions.)

We talk a lot about the way sleep functions as a necessary part of learning, but the way sleep helps us handle stress also seems important when dealing with our overcommitted, underslept students and colleagues.

One issue in discussions of college writing is how to incorporate writing practice into STEM courses. Some Kenyon professors in STEM subjects include journal assignments and process descriptions into their courses. Here are some suggestions on similar metacognitive "writing to learn" approaches, including guidelines for feedback to students.

Cult of Pedagogy editor-in-chief Jennifer Gonzalez reviews research on note taking from the past three decades and revises her own principles for how to help students organize and recall what they are learning.

Some tips on using new technologies to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments while completing the work in a reasonable time frame.

Great introduction to the guiding principles of Universal Design for Learning, as well as no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech tips for providing learners with multiple means of engagement so that we can make sure every learner has the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise and use their unique strengths to be successful.

Fascinating set of articles addressing the ways background music impacts memory, attention, mood, and task performance. (Really short version: quiet is usually better, but not for all tasks, and I'm interested in the ways improved mood and sense of control over the environment might counterbalance other distractors.)

This article touches on some of the concerns about rubrics I often hear from faculty, especially that rubrics cause students to "write to the rubric". The author suggests making rubrics focused on generally beneficial writing habits. Another issue mentioned is the variance of rubrics between faculty, but that seems healthy given that writing assignments are also thinking assignments, and patterns of thinking may vary significantly from course to course.

"After all of the time I spent convincing students that these assignments were no big thing, I was sending the opposite message since clearly my grading problem was a real big thing." T.L. Cowan talks about designing a rubric for "low-stakes" writing assignments which motivates students and preserves her expressive style.

The syllabus and the first days of class can help set up the classroom dynamic for the entire semester. Here are the strategies one professor uses to set up expectations for her courses, including rules for class discussion.

At the GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning Katy Crossley-Frolick at Denison University discusses her use of a dialogue mapping tool to help students unpack complex concepts.

"For years, the term has filled a gap for us. It has functioned rhetorically as a way to contrast evidence-based teaching practices (a much better term, by the way) with more traditional methodologies, but ultimately the wide-ranging utility of this classification is also its drawback."