In last week’s Chronicle Teaching Newsletter, reporter Beth McMurtrie offers a thoughtful reflection on the valuing, and devaluing, of teaching within higher education. Sparked by a conference put on by a high-profile national organization, her points echo ones I’ve heard,…
Category: Ideas and Resources
Revisiting the cognition-motivation connection: What the latest research says about engaging students in the work of learning
Posted in About Minds Online, Academic Life, Ideas and Resources, Student Success, and Trends and Change
I sometimes tell a story about my first solo book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, involving a crisis that hit about 2/3 of the way through writing it. I forget what topic I’d originally planned to cover in chapter…
Tending, befriending, and coping with upending: Takeaways from the first month of mass emergency remote education
Posted in Academic Life, Cognitive Psychology and Learning, Higher Education, Ideas and Resources, Technology, and Trends and Change
About a year ago, I experienced what we all do sooner or later in the course of our face-to-face teaching careers: something terrible and unexpected happened in class. In my case, a student collapsed and became unresponsive*.*The student was okay,…
Neuroscience in translation: Why use it or lose it is a bad idea
Posted in Cognitive Psychology and Learning, Higher Education, and Ideas and Resources
Is there any truism about cognitive capacity that is more familiar than “use it or lose it?” Of all the things we could talk about in applications of neuroscience, this is one that shows up surprisingly often, even in the…
The psychology of transparency, and what it means for learning
Posted in Course Redesign, First-year Learning Initiative, Higher Education, Ideas and Resources, Student Success, and Trends and Change
Have you heard of the transparency concept in teaching gateway courses?