Early this year, after the pandemic had moved my classroom online, a student asked if we could try “silent meetings” in a course I was teaching. At first I assumed that, like many of us, he was just ...

One of Kevin Gannon’s favorite class discussion activities doesn’t involve much talking. Inspired by complete-the-story games in which players each write a line of a tale that builds off a previous ...

Why Are Class Discussions Challenging? There are a variety of reasons that class discussions are challenging. It’s not necessarily just students being “lazy”. There could be a lot of real issues and ...

Discussion-based approaches to instruction, coupled with challenging academic demands, are positively related to students’ literacy performance, a recent study has found. The study examined the way ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Natalie Wexler is an education writer focusing on literacy. Nov 02, 2020, 01:28pm EST Nov 02, 2020, 01:28pm EST This article is ...

All Aboard! Engaging Everyone in Classroom Activities with Liberating Structures When people gather for classes (and meetings), we tend to default to structures with centralized control and minimal ...

Each class and each instructor is going to be a little different and have different needs. In general, to promote student learning, we have to think about providing them with information, giving them ...

In a previous article, Allison Jegla and I emphasized the importance of experimenting to create more effective classroom teaching. We discussed two different approaches that faculty members we know ...

When I began teaching, I adopted the common practice of grading student participation. I set aside 10 percent of my students’ grades for that purpose, and did my best to keep track of how much they ...

I read with interest Anna Broadbent’s essay on the benefits and pitfalls of class participation grades. From my perch as a provost, former dean and former department chair, I find that the grade for ...

During the American Civil War, the military surgeon Theodore Calhoun recommended ridicule as a means to curb the nostalgia of Union soldiers who longed for home and peace. This supposed remedy reminds ...