Moving Forward: Teaching in Uncertain Times | Community Blog on online, hybrid, and F2F teaching during the pandemic

Engagement Withdrawal

While Jennifer Hall’s recent post reminded me that student behavior is not the only way to think about engagement, I must admit that I have been sorely missing those face-to-face signs that students are thinking about course material. As a teacher for over 20 years, I’ve gotten hooked on particular cues that I am doing…

Overcoming Students’ Distaste for Writing through Class Blogs

By Matt Nusnbaum, Ph.D. Department of Biology Student versus expert writing and approaches to writing It is not news that students entering into college are not expert writers; in fact, we wouldn’t expect them to be. When many students leave high school, they have learned the mechanics of writing, but that is a far cry…

“Reading Fatigue”

By Mary Goldschmidt, Ph.D. Part-time Instructor of English, Dunwoody Campus Previously the Director of the Writing Program at The College of New Jersey, and an educational developer at the University of Scranton We have all experienced Zoom (and WebEx) fatigue, but last semester I began to wonder if my students were also experiencing “reading fatigue.”…

Small Teaching: Using Frequent, Low-Stakes Assessments

You may have already encountered the term “Small Teaching” by now, whether it was in a previous blog post or in a CETLOE workshop, but if not, a simple overview would be that it is a pedagogical theory and practice described by James Lang in his book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of…

What sort of engagement are you looking for?

We often speak of engagement as if it is a binary: students are either engaged or unengaged. Students are either raising their hands to participate in an activity, or they are asleep. We can all recognize engagement when we see it. An engaged class is bustling, full of an energy that any casual observer could…

Trusting the Group Dynamic in Asynchronous Instruction

By Daniel Holmes (Lecturer, Department of English) With Spring 2021 syllabusing drawing nearer, I’ve been reflecting on the ways assignments designed for in-person synchronous classes translated to asynchronous virtual learning over the course of the Fall 2020 semester. The most challenging adjustment I faced—and the one that shed the most light on the ways a…

Share Your Assignments

The best part of working at CETLOE is having regular opportunities to talk to other teachers about what they are doing in the classroom. I change what I am doing in my classes almost every semester based on conversations with faculty and grad students about new assignments, strategies, and content they are trying out. During…

Seizing SOTL Opportunities During (and After) the Pandemic

By Mike Metzler, Ph.D. (Emeritus Professor, Kinesiology & Health and CETLOE Associate Director for SoTL) One facet of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) is the study of new and innovative teaching methods, often comparing them with prior ways to instruct. Historically, those new and innovative methods have been implemented by instructors making voluntary…

Lessons in Supporting the Mental Health of Students

By Kristie Seelman, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, School of Social Work) Back when the pandemic first hit the U.S. during the Spring semester 2020, I was teaching a policy class in which students submit brief logs summarizing the work they’ve been doing on a major project and questions they have along the way. When classes moved…

Time for Reflection: Metacognition and Learning Transfer

As we near the end of the semester, it is tempting to think of our class as “finished”; yet if the work we have done all semester is to be successful, then a class does not end with final exams. The ultimate goal of learning is “transfer;” we want the students to take the knowledge…