Stay tuned for the end-of-term life update below the main content! Conflicting Lesson Results One of the most frustrating things about teaching is just how unpredictable a lesson plan can be. If you’ve been teaching the same content to different groups of students for any length of time, you’ve probably had this experience: You carefullyContinue reading “One Lesson Plan, Two Results”
Tag Archives: teaching
Reading for Saturation
When we teach college writing, we’re generally asking students to write in genres that they may have never read. Why, then, do we expect them to be able to write these successfully? Genres are, as I have often observed, slippery things and can’t really be completely understood through explicit instruction. Sure, scholars can and oftenContinue reading “Reading for Saturation”
Hinges and Stitches: Thinking About Transitions in Writing
I was winging it in the classroom the other day, analyzing some paragraphs in a response to a very important landmark physics paper and how they transition, and I hit on an image that I think is going to be useful for a long time: hinges and stitches. My class uses Graff and Birkenstein’s excellentContinue reading “Hinges and Stitches: Thinking About Transitions in Writing”
Report On Self-Assessment Grading
If you’ll recall, this semester for my New Semester’s Resolution, I was trying a more collaborative approach to grading that requires students to set goals by modifying my provided rubric and then evaluate their own work according to that rubric, so that they self-grade their assignments. At this point, students have submitted their first self-evaluationContinue reading “Report On Self-Assessment Grading”
Perceiving Academic Journals
I started college in 2005, just at the cusp of learning management systems; things like Blackboard were in use, but most courses still had physical syllabi passed out on day one, and most assignments were still printed out on paper and handed in physically. In the same way, online journals were increasingly popular at theContinue reading “Perceiving Academic Journals”
Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome
Since I started experimenting with penalty-free flexible deadlines, which was shortly before the pandemic (good timing on that one!), the regular question I’ve gotten was how to avoid the work piling up when students inevitably turn in lots of late work. The answer is actually that the flexible deadlines prevent grading from piling up ratherContinue reading “Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome”
Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing
When you teach a course on writing research, of course you do a lot of work with source handling. I suspect that most of us were taught summary, paraphrase, and quotation as a set, and many of us were given exercises that drilled us to do each of these things with a source on command.Continue reading “Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing”
Analysis of a Classroom
This semester, a very generous classroom coordinator scheduled me (intentionally) to teach all my morning classes in one room and all my afternoon classes in another. So I have five classes this semester, but only two classrooms, and no hurry to get between them. I’m quite thankful for it. But it also gives me aContinue reading “Analysis of a Classroom”
Please Don’t Trick Your Students
It’s April Fool’s Day, so let’s talk about tricks teachers play on students. You know the kind. The teacher who writes a whole exam of too-difficult questions only to put in the middle of the instructions that to pass the exam, simply hand it in blank. The ones who bury an important policy in theContinue reading “Please Don’t Trick Your Students”
What I Miss From Last Semester’s Contract Grading Experiment
Last semester I tried to finally make the hard switch to contract grading, motivated by a number of reasons. My motivations were good, and my policies had been gradually trending that way anyway, but (as I have explained before) the experiment didn’t go well, with a much higher fail rate than I’m used to seeingContinue reading “What I Miss From Last Semester’s Contract Grading Experiment”
Dr. Cox's Desk 