We’re almost a month into the fall semester at this point. It’s likely that you’ve encountered some problematic student behavior that is really frustrating you. Or maybe you’re feeling constantly low-key angry in class, but can’t put your finger on what exactly is bothering you. In either case, today’s post is all about figuring out what student behavior is upsetting you and coming up with solutions that will decrease your negative feelings.
Continue readingErika Romero
PhD Candidate and Education Blogger
Category: Teaching Tips (page 1 of 5)
The fall semester has started, and you’re teaching a course that’s heavy on reading assignments. How do you get your students to actually do the reading? Literature courses are often general education courses, which means that many of your students aren’t used to heavy reading loads and have little to no interest in doing all the reading you’ve assigned to them. So, in today’s post, I want to offer three student accountability strategies that can help motivate your students to read their assigned texts. While the strategies might be quite common, I go into detail on how I design these activities for best effect.
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We’ve reached the final blog post in the “Successful Start: Designing Your First Week of Class” series. Today’s post follows up on the workbook’s descriptions of various types of student self-assessment activities, the goals of these activities, and how to approach creating one. If you’re just joining us now, here’s the free 60+ page Successful Start workbook which you can use to create your materials for the first week of class. At this point, we’ve covered the syllabus, course schedule, icebreakers, and major class assignments and their instruction sheets. Complimentary YouTube videos for this whole series are also available, with the final video touching upon the benefits of having students complete a self-assessment during week one.
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We’ve officially arrived at week four of the “Successful Start” series. So far, we’ve covered the syllabus, the course schedule, and icebreakers. Next week we’ll wrap up with student self-assessments. But today, it’s all about your major class assignments and how to introduce them to your students. In the workbook, I cover standard and nonstandard elements when creating your assignment instruction sheets. In today’s video (embedded in this post), I discuss how I introduce my major assignments to students during the first week of class (and why I do so during week one). In this blog post, I’m going over a few of the major assignment types I’ve used in my courses (examples included), in case you’re stuck on deciding what assignments to include in your courses (or don’t know where to begin). I’ve included my perspective on why I think these assignments work well for students and for instructors, as well.
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Today’s post will be a quick read, since I’ve already described in detail seven different icebreaker activities that I’ve used in my classrooms in the workbook that accompanies this five-part series. [For anyone who’s just joining us, we’ve already covered the syllabus and the course schedule elements of the first week of class.] Rather than go over the same icebreaker descriptions again, I thought I’d share a few personal experiences I’ve had with icebreakers instead. I’m also sharing a few additional icebreaker games that can be used with larger student numbers (75+). Let’s go break some ice!
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Creating a syllabus is an essential step in preparing for the first week of teaching a college class. But once you know what topics, activities, and texts you WANT to include in your college course, the next step is to figure out if you have the TIME to devote to all that material. As such, the second part of my “Successful Start” series focuses on structuring a college course schedule. In the workbook, I go over my step-by-step process of brainstorming what to include in a course and drafting a full course schedule. Drafting a course schedule that actually has enough time allotted for everything that needs to be covered (or that you want to cover) is an essential step in preparing to teach a new course. In today’s post, I provide four examples of course schedules I’ve created. Let’s take a look behind the scenes of designing these documents.
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