Student Guide Corner

I received the following email from Dennis Beresford about my previous blog posting.    In that earlier essay, I had indicated that I expected my students to study before each class as if a quiz were scheduled even though no quiz was going to be given.    I want them to motivate themselves to do the work rather than leaving the motivation up to me as the teacher.    It is their education.    They should care enough to have the discipline needed to do the work. I have long argued that students will always do much better in any class if they feel a sense of urgency.    The only question is whether that urgency needs to be externally driven or whether the students can be expected to create it for themselves.    As many of you will know, Professor Beresford served as the chairman of FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) from 1987 until 1997.    Since that time, he has been the Ernst & Young Executive Professor o...

  If you have followed my blog postings over the years, you know that I have several obsessions about teaching.    (1) � I believe in having a lot of communications with my students.   Whether it is love, marriage, or a college class, things go better with communication.    To the teacher, everything makes sense.    Too often, to the students, everything is a mystery.    I want to cut out as much of that mystery as possible.   I think students respond well when they understand what is expected of them. (2) � I believe in honest and frank communication.    College students are adults.   I never see any reason to feed them a bunch of nonsense.    If you aren�t going to tell them the truth, you would be better off not to have the communication.    I think you should stress the good as well as the bad.   No one wants to get praise all the time and no one wants to hear how bad they are all t...

I began giving teaching presentations about 10-12 years ago.    As I have said many times, I enjoyed that experience immensely because it forced me to spend serious time thinking more deeply about my own teaching.    I cannot begin to guess the number of times in the last few years that I have asked myself: --What really happened in class today?    --Why didn�t this work? --How should I have changed what I did? --What was wrong with that particular question? --Why did the class seem unorganized? --How did I manage to confuse so many students in that discussion? All those questions eventually led me to begin writing about teaching and now I am up to over 250 pages.    And, I am still asking questions and still learning. One of the very first teaching concepts that I ever developed for myself was �the learning triangle.�    I remember standing in front of 100 or so brilliant professors one day a number of years ago in one of my very firs...

If you care about kids please read this. This is an urgent request. The deadline for public comment is today, February 4, by 5:00 PM EST. Today is the last day for Public Comment on Reading Accommodations on the PARCC. Click  here to access the accommodations  and here to  answer the survey . (if you agree with me that this is an important issue, please consider voting NO on the three questions).   The Promise - " When the Race to the Top (RTTT) Assessment applications were announced, all applicants were asked to describe how they would use the principles of universal design for learning (UDL). In the application that won them the grant, PARCC made a commitment to universally design its assessment at every stage." (1)  Many educators who work with students who have learning disabilities were excited when we heard the new assessments would be delivered using digital text. The playing field would be leveled using principles of Universal Design. Tools like Text t...