| NMC's Center for Teaching and Learning

Do I have enough content in my course?

Nov 2, 2018

Now there is a question I would guess many people have either asked or been asked. For blended and online developments in particular I have this conversation time and time again. Of course there is a particular pedagogical paradigm and …

Can We Treat Our Students Like Adults?

Nov 2, 2018

For many of us, our students are first-time college students which means they are first time adults. For many of these students this means this is the first time they are given the chance to choose for themselves. Their whole lives someone has been making all of the...

Resilience

Nov 1, 2018

Martin Seligman, in graduate school, worked with dogs who surprised researchers and prompted the term “learned helplessness”. These dogs, upon receiving shocks, simply stopped attempting to get away from the shocks. What stood out to Seligman, however, (as an...

Never Give Them Zeros for a Grade

Oct 30, 2018

You may have seen the headline, “Teacher Fired for Giving Students Zeros for not Turning in Assignments”. Certainly great click-bait from a publisher’s standpoint, but what is this really about. At a conference roundtable I attended many years ago, we discussed this...

Would You Please Start Arguing Part 2 of 4

Oct 29, 2018

Welcome back to my serial piece–I’ll pick up where I left off last week, on the idea that it is difficult to abandon old techniques and move toward new ones, argumentatively. Something that exacerbates the comment-section mentality is that we’re experiencing...