Looking Back on the Backwards Survey August 21, 2015
In November 2012, CTE Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of History, Caleb McDaniel, wrote a brief essay about his plans to teach his United States history survey backwards—by starting in the present and working his way back to 1848. After teaching it twice in slightly different forms in 2013 and 2015, he recently reflected on his experience in his personal blog. In this post, we are pleased to re-share Caleb's extensive and thoughtful analysis with our readers.
Building Social Connections Through Discussion for Better Learning August 13, 2015
Learning is a social process mediated by collaboration with others. Given the sociability of learning, how can we maximize student interaction and set up a social context in our classrooms for meaningful and productive learning? While there are lots of ways to encourage and support interaction among students, class discussions are perhaps the most intuitive way for many faculty and students. In this blog post I offer some tips and tricks for creating good discussions in any classroom.
Lessons from a Toy August 6, 2015
In a fascinating article from 2011, a team of psychologists and cognitive scientists from UC Berkeley, the University of Louisville, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard report on an experiment they conducted with 85 children between the ages of 4 and 6. The children were divided into four groups, with each group experiencing a different experimental condition. Each condition involved the use of a specially designed toy. I was drawn to this study because I think it has implications for higher education. Although our brains change and mature dramatically as we age, the mechanisms by which we learn do not necessarily shift as much as we might think.
Academic Blogging and Student Evaluation Click Bait: A Follow-Up July 28, 2015
A few weeks ago, we published a piece in which I argued that nearly everything written about student evaluations on the internet is a form of academic click bait, and that there is often little-to-no relationship between the viral success of these pieces and the quality of their arguments. I was, of course, aware of the irony of making such claims on the internet, particularly via a blog post that intentionally avoided the literature I called on all of us to read. And as this piece got a great deal of attention in the days after it was posted, I couldn’t help but smile as my intuition on these matters was confirmed.
Teaching the Storm: Pedagogical Lessons from Alice Goffman’s "On the Run" July 16, 2015
Alice Goffman's book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City received more attention than most top sociologists at the pinnacle of their careers could hope for. However, the positive reviews that On the Run enjoyed early on were quickly joined by criticism and controversy. Ultimately, the On the Run controversy raises important pedagogical questions for us.