One of the issues that I struggle with as an instructor is test anxiety—not my own, but my students’. Every…
Student motivation journal club: Starting the year with a framework to understand motivation
Last week, my colleague Heather Fedesco and I convened the first meeting of a new, CFT-sponsored journal club on student…
Big classes, name tents, and anxiety in the classroom
Classes at my institution started last week, which means that my co-teacher and I greeted just over 150 students in…
Signal-to-noise in the classroom
I’ve been thinking a lot about signal-to-noise ratio this summer. My post-doctoral research relied heavily on mass spectrometry of complex…
Evidence Based Teaching Guides: Links to and summaries of the literature
A few years ago, the editorial board at LSE hatched the idea of “choose your own adventure” guides to literature…
Evidence-based teaching: my definition
I’ve been thinking lately about what we mean when we say “evidence-based teaching.” It’s a term I’ve used a lot…
Lessons of a 4th grade something
Outstanding teaching practices in my daughter’s MNPS classroom Public education is taking a beating these days. I think it’s been…
Who’s doing all the work? Who’s having all the fun?
Part 2: Five adaptable steps to active learning I recently wrote about Barb Stengel’s challenge to ask ourselves “Who’s doing…
Who’s doing all the work? Who’s having all the fun?
Part 1: Five steps to incorporating productive failure into your course Several years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of…
How do you think about learning? And how does mental model impact your teaching choices?
I asked myself these questions a couple of years ago, when I was working with a group of junior faculty…
