The Syllabus is a Lie: Spring Semester Shake-down
When I was a college student in Iowa I traveled around a fair amount moving between home and campus. The roads in Iowa wind and twist through the natural rise and fall of the landscape. If you have only ever seen Iowa from I-80 you’re really missing some of the most beautiful scenery in the [...]
Reservations in teaching with Google Plus
Six months ago I started using Google+ as a more transparent and effective way of managing the communication element of my online classroom. The potential benefits of the platform were clear. Most of the complications I perceived in those first few classes were resolved as the Google developers team made upgrades to the interface and [...]
Five traits of a successful professor . . . the student’s perspective
Every semester, in my Public Speaking class, I ask my students to write down their favorite teacher/professor and what they did that made them a favorite. Originally I envisioned that the students would talk about elements of speaking that would feed later lessons on being a quality speakers. Instead I found a list of stories [...]
Diversifying Form: Rethinking how mainstream institutions approach arts education
I’ve been working with a really great group of students in acting class. It’s the kind of class where you see growth and dedication that leads to a really exciting classroom to be a part of. You know the kind, the kind where education is happening. Mine and theirs. I’ve had a couple of down [...]
Creating Life-Long Learners
I’ve been reading a lot about teaching and learning lately. In-depth stuff and big picture stuff. It seems to me that education and how we think about education is beginning to shift in a big way across a lot of planes. A colleague and I were talking about our own teaching experiences earlier this week. [...]
Week Zero: Why you should engage students before classes start.
You arrive at the mall with a long list of things to do. You’ve got 6 or 7 places you need to visit and a lot to get in each one. You may have been to this mall before but you’ve never been to any of the stores that you need to visit today. Each [...]
The Art of Subjectivity
I put a lot of stock in seeing things with my own eyes. We are our own most reliable resource. At least we think we are. Even though I am an artist, I’m a pretty literal thinker. I like facts and systems. Outcomes. Because of this I can empathize with my students when they go [...]
What would it take?
I understand resistance to change. Embracing new ways of doing things can sometimes suggest a lot of collateral meaning, the most complicated of which might be the implication that if the change you are looking at is a good change, then they way you have been doing things wasn’t the best way. That’s a lot [...]
10 reasons you should be web-enhancing your courses
Web-enhancing courses isn’t really new. In fact, most of the professors at my institution web-enhance their classes to some degree or another. Interestingly, the ones who refuse come from a pretty wide demographic. For clarity, a web-enhanced course is simply a traditionally taught course that has an online “classroom space” that the professor uses to [...]
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