Getting Students to “Do the Readings” (Hint: Don’t Assign Readings)

Original article posted on The Teaching Professor here. A lot of professors assign readings as follows: students read a piece of text, respond to it in some way, and

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Teaching Online: What Do Students Wish You Knew? (2021 Edition)

If you follow my blog, you’ve heard of my series, What Do Students Wish You Knew? Each semester, I ask my students what they wished their professors would

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How to Help Students Stay on Top of Things

You ever have students miss an assignment?  Or forget to do something they’re supposed to do? Or just in general get easily confused about class? I do. It

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Teaching College Tip #6

Provide an optional final. This is a collection of questions pulled from the weekly quizzes. It your course is scored out of 1000 points, this final could be

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“Touching Your Students”: No, It’s Not What You Think

If you’re teaching online, you WILL lose students. Some will engage less. Others will disappear. Why? Many reasons, of course. But today, I’m focused on one: Because online,

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What Frustrates Students Most About Online Classes

As Spring 2020 comes to a close, I decided to take stock. What worked in my online class during COVID-19 and what didn’t, from a teaching perspective? What

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Should Students Show their Faces on Zoom?

Last week I conducted classes virtually and in real time on Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Collaborate Ultra (Blackboard’s videoconferencing feature). And the whole time all I could focus

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Get Students to Read and Participate Using QQC

Over the past couple of weeks, I tweaked my “Question, Quotation, or Comment” (QQC) strategy, which encourages students to come to class more prepared. And it looks promising.

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What Students Wish You Knew (Spring 2020 Edition)

What is the ONE thing students wish professors would better understand? Aside from the obvious—that students have busy lives outside of school, that they take four other classes

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Engaging Students on a Personal Level

Bombing the Guest Lecture After more than 30 years as an executive in Silicon Valley, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to teach Business 70 at my

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