Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Teaching & Learning Links of the Week: Nov. 28, 2016

A roundup of four intriguing posts and articles from around the Internet.

Enhancing Learning through Zest, Grit, and Sweat

Lolita Paff identified three overlooked aspects of teaching that need to be promoted; (1) encouraging student intellectual curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm (zest), (2) an understanding that true long-lasting learning takes effort, hard and smart work (sweat), and (3) an academic growth mindset, perseverance and persistence (grit). Author gives tips on how to implement each of these three aspects in class.

Ugly Consequences of Complaining about ‘Students These Days’

Frequent venting about students who come unprepared to class or who are willing to cheat can turn into complaining and that may change our mindset about our students over time. Consequently, this mindset may change the instructional design environment, the way we teach in class or the number of preventative policies we apply.

All Learning is an Active Process: Rethinking Active/Passive Learning Debate- How Faculty Can Create Learning Opportunities in Overtly Passive Environments

Todd Zakrajsek proposes that it is time to differentiate passive learning from being in passive environment and suggests how to maximize learning in both active and passive environments. For learning to happen, several factors are involved regardless of how information is experienced. When you attend to the information, when presented information has value to you, easy to understand, you are allowed time to practice recalling/ reflecting, and you are physically and emotionally ready to process the information (e.g. not too tired), then the probability learning will take place increases greatly.

Contingent Faculty Positions

Who are "contingent faculty"? Depending on the institution, they can be known as adjuncts, postdocs, TAs, non-tenure-track faculty, clinical faculty, part-timers, lecturers, instructors, or nonsenate faculty. What they all have in common: they serve in insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom. And they are the vast majority of US faculty today. Something needs to change.

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