Teaching
“Flipping the classroom” has become something of a buzzword in the last several years, driven in part by high profile publications in The New York Times (Fitzpatrick, 2012); The Chronicle of Higher Education (Berrett, 2012); and Science (Mazur, 2009); In essence, “flipping the classroom” means that students gain first exposure to new material outside of class, usually via reading or lecture videos, and then use class time to do the harder work of assimilating that knowledge, perhaps through problem-solving, discussion, or debates.
"What do you really, really wish your professors understood?"
I’ve been posing that question to students in my remedial-writing courses over the past few semesters. At two-year colleges, we’ve collected plenty of statistics on the challenges facing underprepared students. But we haven’t spent much time seeking their perspectives on teaching and learning. When given license to "talk back" — in any terms they wished — what did my developmental-writing students want to say to those of us at the front of the classroom?
Only 20% of remedial math students make it to a college-level math course — who’s teaching their teachers?
I n junior high and high school, I was a full-fledged math and science nerd. I made A’s in math and science classes; began to read, collect, and draw from Marvel comic books; and read voraciously science-fiction (SF) novels by Arthur C. Clarke as well as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Make a plan for evaluating the students and stick to it. Evaluation procedures should be decided on when the course is in the planning stages. If you are working with teaching assistants or colleagues, meet with them and decide what kinds of evaluation methods are to be used. Then decide how the students’ work should be graded and what proportion of the final mark each assignment, quiz, etc., will comprise.
H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited networks publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussions for colleagues and the interested public. The computing heart and main office of H-Net resides at the History Department, Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe.
Many developmental students begin college ill-equipped in the social and emotional competencies to be successful. Thus, it is essential that institutions of higher education address the broader needs of these students. The purpose of this article is to present collaborative learning as a tool for addressing the social and emotional inhibitors that may prevent success during this time of transition. We address potential concerns for making this pedagogical shift and present reasons for considering this approach.
Ideally, speakers mean what they say and say what they mean. Spoken communication is not that simple. Much of what we understand—whether when listening or reading—we understand indirectly, by inference. Listening involves a complex combination of hearing words, analyzing sentence structure, and attempting to find meaning within the context of the given situation.
The situation with the written word is no different.
As I finish my fifteenth year in an English classroom, I’m seriously thinking about tattooing the following phrase across my belly in Old English lettering ala Tupac: “Students will write more; teachers will grade less.”
Finding practical ideas about college reading that have been drawn from theory and research is difficult for most veteran instructors, but it is even more difficult for the beginner unaware of professional organizations and journals. This problem of dissemination is exacerbated by the fact that there are very few formal university programs that focus on the training of college reading specialists.