Can We Treat Our Students Like Adults?

Can We Treat Our Students Like Adults?

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

Resilience

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

Never Give Them Zeros for a Grade

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

Would You Please Start Arguing Part 2 of 4

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...
Quests are King

Quests are King

Well, at least many students think they are very cool. I have slowly moved my courses to a quest-based assignment system. I have taken my regular assignments and tests and broken them up over the semester so students are doing many small things rather than a few big...