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.
