Teaching Tips from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi, our campus’s 2021 Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writer, is a History professor at Boston University, founder of two Antiracist Research Centers, and the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America). UP has chosen his bestseller How to Be an…Continue Reading Teaching Tips from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist

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

Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

We’ve all been in a crunch over the past week and a half as the spread and unknown reach of the Coronavirus sent us all on many directions. During this time, our colleagues have been learning new systems like Microsoft Teams and TechSmith Relay, and our students have been trying to adjust to our online…Continue Reading Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

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.”