All instructors, regardless of the field, can promote mental health both by sharing specific resources and by designing accessible and flexible courses.
A concise guide to students as partners in higher education, including definitions, best practices, emerging questions for research, and key scholarship.
The switch to online delivery further disadvantaged students from migrant and refugee backgrounds. But a new study also finds many students and staff developed closer and more caring relationships.
a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
“I must say, what contributed to my wellbeing is that the lectures are good and they (lecturers) are very well prepared when coming to lecture us…” The words of an 18-year-old undergraduate Biological Sciences student When considering student wellbeing, we often think of innovative interventions, the quality of psychological student support services and the need…
Short version: My new book Learning Online: The Student Experience has been published ahead of schedule by Johns Hopkins University Press. The Press has made the book available online for free as part of its efforts to support COVID-19 responses.
The real number of students using artificial intelligence is likely far higher, experts say, with detection tools only able to catch unsophisticated cheats.
Academic integrity has been a sector wide issue for many decades. However, it has only been since the early 2000s that academics such as Tracey Bretag began driving a focus on reducing academic integrity breaches in higher education. In more recent times, as COVID-19 saw a mainstreaming of on-line assessments, the scourge of commercial contract cheating became a particularly significant issue for academic integrity.
As we start a new fall semester, instructors should keep in mind that today’s students come from a vast array of backgrounds and still have pandemic-related stress.
If educators understand the factors that interplay with emotional states to affect learning, they can work with this to enhance the learning experience. Here are six strategies to manage the role of emotions in learning
Enrollment in courses taught remotely in higher education has been on the rise, with a recent surge in response to a global pandemic. While adapting this form of teaching, instructors familiar with traditional face-to-face methods are now met with a new set of challenges, including students not turning on their cameras during synchronous class meetings held via videoconferencing. After transitioning to emergency remote instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our introductory biology course shifted all in-person laboratory sections into synchronous class meetings held via the Zoom videoconferencing program. Out of consideration for students, we established a policy that video camera use during class was optional, but encouraged. However, by the end of the semester, several of our instructors and students reported lower than desired camera use that diminished the educational experience. We surveyed students to better understand why they did not turn on their cameras. We confirmed several predicted reasons including the most frequently reported: being concerned about personal appearance. Other reasons included being concerned about other people and the physical location being seen in the background and having a weak internet connection, all of which our exploratory analyses suggest may disproportionately influence underrepresented minorities. Additionally, some students revealed to us that social norms also play a role in camera use. This information was used to develop strategies to encourage—without requiring—camera use while promoting equity and inclusion. Broadly, these strategies are to not require camera use, explicitly encourage usage while establishing norms, address potential distractions, engage students with active learning, and understand your students’ challenges through surveys. While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, our recommendations will likely be directly helpful to many instructors and also serve as a model for gathering data to develop strategies more tailored for other student populations.
A surge in awareness about disinformation among pupils and teachers has been accompanied by a rise in the number of teachers who bring up this thorny issue in the classroom. But the gap between demand and supply remains largely unchanged. The share of teachers saying digital literacy is important is still nearly 30 percentage points above those who say it is being taught.
Finding the perfect student relationship management system implementation, or SRM, is getting more important for today's higher education institutions, but, it seems, that's not getting any easier to achieve.
Recent allegations of cheating by university students in online exams suggest the students are adapting faster than the education system itself – and that should change.
Student question generation is a constructive strategy that enriches learning, yet is hardly practiced in higher education. The study described here presents a potential model for integratin
Walking past an open classroom door, I often find myself astonished to hear the professor speaking to college students as if they were third graders. It’s not my place to criticize someone else’s teaching without sitting in on their class properly. But whenever I overhear a faculty member talking down to students, I wonder: Why do you do that? What do you gain from treating your students as antagonists, employees, or children? Do you really think that tone makes students want to come to your class?
Similarly, when supervising new graduate-student instructors, I often have to convince these rookie teachers that their syllabus does not need to contain a litany of rules and regulations, threatening punishment for bad behavior at every turn. “Your position automatically gives you authority in the classroom,” I tell them. “You don’t need to go out of your way assert it with your words.”
Tone matters when you communicate with students. It’s one of the most important ways you can influence your students’ learning environment.
Since August, I’ve been writing about motivation — specifically, the three variables that most contribute to student motivation, as laid out in How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Learning, a 2010 book written by current and former staff members of Carnegie Mellon University’s teaching center. Their argument: If you want students to be motivated to learn in your classroom, they need to value the goals you set for them, believe that accomplishing those goals is possible, and feel supported along the way. Having covered the first two, I’ll focus here on that last element — whether the learning environment in your classroom is supportive.
It’s easy to grasp why learning environment would affect student motivation. If the projects you are asking students to complete are difficult (as they should be), if success is not guaranteed (as it shouldn’t be), then the kind of support students will receive along the way becomes a pressing issue. The less supported they feel, the less motivated they will be in pursuit of a course goal. How Learning Works offers a raft of research to show that whether or not students feel included in your course is a prominent indicator of their likelihood of success.
So what can you do to help students feel supported in your classroom?
Change your tone. Like it or not, the way you communicate with students speaks volumes about how you see them and sends a message about their place in the course. Treat students like children and you’re telling them you expect them to act like children. You might as well just say: “I don’t expect you to take full responsibility for this course or its goals.”
How you talk to students during class and office hours, how you call on them to contribute, how you address them in writing on assignment and homework prompts — all of those are opportunities to let students know that they own the course and the institution as much as you do. The more secure they feel in that ownership, the more motivated they will be to work hard.
One indicator of a supportive environment is the degree to which students feel comfortable coming to you for help. Even the tone and phrasing of your syllabus policies can make a difference. According to not-very-surprising research cited in How Learning Works, “Students are less likely to seek help from the instructor who worded those policies in punitive language than from the instructor who worded the same policies in rewarding language.” Hand out a strict, punitive-sounding syllabus and you reveal from the get-go how approachable you are (not very) and how much they can trust you to help when they need it (not much).
Go out of your way, particularly early in the semester, to set the right tone:
Reassure students that it’s OK if they don’t understand everything at first. When they express uncertainty in class, make sure you respond in a way that encourages others to feel comfortable expressing their uncertainty as well. Explicitly remind students of your office hours. Keep encouraging them to come to you for extra help. Don’t expect them to automatically take advantage of opportunities for support. Create an environment that helps students get to know one another. Research has shown that student participation in class is influenced more by peers than by the instructor’s interpersonal style. That is: Whether your students participate in class is affected less by their perception of you and more by their perception that other students in the room are welcoming, encouraging, and attentive. They clam up if they are worried about how their peers will react.
But just because students attribute their own sense of comfort to their peers’ behavior doesn’t mean the instructor is irrelevant. For one, students may not always know exactly why they feel more comfortable in one class rather than another. More important, instructors have a big role to play in shaping the environment of the classroom. You help create the conditions in which students feel welcomed and respected, whether they realize you’re behind it or not.
Here are ways to create that environment:
Set aside time for activities that help students get to know one another and bring their lives into the classroom. For example, instead of just taking attendance in the usual way, do a question roll: Ask students to answer an informal question at the beginning of class after you call out their names. It’s an easy way to help everyone feel more comfortable with each other, and with you. Look for ways to connect course material with students’ lives, so that they might discuss their experiences and grow closer as a community. Giving that community a chance to develop can be a huge help in your efforts to motivate students. Sometimes the best teaching strategy is to get out of the way and let your students get to know each other, see what’s valuable in one another, and start trusting each other. Practice inclusive teaching. To me, inclusive teaching is an approach that seeks both to treat students equally and to recognize the inequalities of the world. If you are serious about creating a welcoming environment that helps every student be motivated to learn, you need to open your eyes to how your usual way of doing things may be making some students feel less than supported.
Everyone has implicit biases. Combating them is difficult precisely because they are implicit — but it’s not impossible. A good place to start: On your syllabus, spell out your policies about the importance of mutual respect and tolerance in the classroom. Even better, make sure your course includes (and centers) identities other than your own. As How Learning Works notes, course content — including not just readings but also “the examples and metaphors instructors use in class and the case studies and project topics we let our students choose” — is important because it sends “messages about the field and who belongs in it.”
Even if you’re not swayed by the social-justice argument for inclusive teaching, the pedagogical argument is pretty strong, too. You are helping your students develop into capable and responsible citizens. Take each of them seriously and work to make sure your classroom environment is designed with all of them in mind. As the research shows, when students feel they belong in your classroom, they are more likely to be motivated to work hard, and more likely to learn.
The environment within your classroom is not completely under your control as the instructor. But there’s enough you can influence to make thinking about course climate a worthy pursuit.
David Gooblar is a lecturer in the rhetoric department at the University of Iowa. He writes a column on teaching for The Chronicle and runs Pedagogy Unbound, a website for college instructors who share teaching strategies. To find more advice on teaching, browse his previous columns here.
In my opinion this article is so useful since us, as teachers, are also humans, and as humans we make mistakes, we need to understand it, but also our students. And also it is important in our learning process not only growing up as proffessionals, but also as human beigns. Students could see us as en example to follow, as perfect persons, but we know that we are not that. The benefits or the reasons of apologizing with our students showed in this article, witten by a principal of a High School, help us to show our students ourselves as we truly are, accept our mistakes and have a good relationship with them.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
