Practicing What You Teach

Zoom training with PAL facilitators

The power of peer educators to help your students practice We worked hard to become experts in our fields. We faculty work hard to plan and teach our classes. And now a pandemic has us working hard to continue and refine the shift to remote teaching. As professionals in teaching within higher education during trying…Continue Reading Practicing What You Teach

What Peer-Assisted Learning Can Teach Us

By Jeffrey White In my role directing the Learning Commons, I have had the opportunity to connect nationally with practitioners and researchers in the field of peer-led course-based learning assistance (CLA), such as Supplemental Instruction (SI) and its variation Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL). Both SI and PAL focus on difficult courses, especially those in which the…Continue Reading What Peer-Assisted Learning Can Teach Us

Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

students sitting around a table in the tutoring center

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions: Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state) Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)…Continue Reading Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

“…and I was happy not to finish what I had intended.”

Last week, Lars Larson challenged us to integrate interleaving into our courses, basing his proposal on principles found in Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make it Stick (2014). One simple approach to interleaving is to bridge the introduction of material over two classes while also working on a different topic or concept. Although I know to…Continue Reading “…and I was happy not to finish what I had intended.”

Student Athlete Mental Health: Are Sports Special?

a basketball hoop seen from below and behind

This post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns. Do student-athletes tend to have more mental health problems than the general student population, fewer mental health problems, or similar mental health problems? In the Spring of 2017,…Continue Reading Student Athlete Mental Health: Are Sports Special?