Elizabeth Dunham, MLS, is a retired marketing executive and current adjunct lecturer at York College of Pennsylvania. She teaches courses in business communication as well as the first-year experience. Here is her first person account of how she incorporated low-stakes oral presentations into her courses to build her students’s confidence. Most students dread presentations. Every time I start a new semester, and I announce that presentations are a requirement, the fear and tension in the…
Wearing an effortless smile and a crisp, gray suit with a cloth lapel flower, Tommy Nalls Jr. projects confidence. Which is the point. In a ballroom full of job candidates, no one wants to dance with a desperate partner. And, as badly as his district needs teachers, Nalls doesn’t want just any teacher. “They have to have this certain grit, that certain fight,” says Nalls, director of recruitment for Jackson Public Schools, in Mississippi’s capital…
Throughout 2022, the Biden administration urged schools to spend their $122 billion in federal recovery funds on tutoring to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said students who had fallen behind should receive at least 90 minutes of tutoring a week. Last summer, the White House put even more muscle behind the rhetoric and launched a “National Partnership for Student Success” with the goal of providing students with high…
Just as all students are different, so are all instructors. We need to ensure we are implementing instructional technology tools that fit our teaching style, availability, and technology skill level. If any instructor wishes to incorporate a new technology tool, it is vital we first assess the tool’s “goodness of fit” for both student population and course content. An instructional technology tool with a “goodness of fit” for a particular course and student group demonstrates…
Students are often reluctant to seek academic help from their instructors, despite the fact that many of them could benefit from the help. Teachers are being encouraged to develop supportive relationships with students, and most are willing to do so. In the case of students seeking help, what we need is clear information about those teacher characteristics that motivate students to ask. Here are the top ten reasons students don’t ask for help, according to…
Goal writing is an important skill for students of all ages. Hear one teacher’s perspective on teaching goal-writing. On the first day of classes two years ago, I had students in my professional and technical writing course send me an email with their goals for the semester. I discovered they had no understanding of goals, expectations, or objectives. The next semester I explained that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, positive, and have a time…
As a teacher watched a video of a classroom discussion she recorded, she kept noticing places where discussion would be on the verge of beginning, only to see it die almost immediately. The students were prepared, and they were often asking the types of questions teachers want them to ask–so why did the discussion keep faltering? She had to start looking at their pedagogy. What she discovered was that they didn’t know how to build…
Many migrants, especially unaccompanied youth, face uncertain paths in detention and after their release in local communities. Schools are often the first and sometimes the only places they can turn for resources. Research shows that everyday educators have been left to deal with the aftermath of recent political charades, as well as a broken immigrant system, racialized immigration surveillance, deplorable detention facility conditions, and lack of access to educational and social resources for young people.…
Learning transfer is the practice of applying knowledge or meaning from a familiar context to an unfamiliar context. This movement requires re-contextualizing what students know, which first requires that they strip ‘what they know’ of all context, consider it in isolation, then adapt it to work elsewhere. This is a cognitively demanding practice. Of course, this doesn’t happen by admonishing students to transfer their knowledge, but rather is the result of transfer-by-design. This entails continuously…
Instructors and students often have different ideas about what grades are supposed to measure. Should they be about how much students have learned? How much work they have completed? How well they have mastered the subject? Arguably, they measure none of these well. Grades can perpetuate bias, inequalities, and injustice; reduce student motivation and willingness to challenge themselves; and add enormous administrative burdens. No wonder many students and faculty dislike grades. Collaborative grading could be…
