Student Guide Corner

(If you would like for me to send you an email whenever I post a new blog entry, just drop me a note at Jhoyle@richmond.edu and I'll add you to my list.) On October 1, 2017, I posted the first of a two-part blog entry on the importance of the 2-4 days after the first test of the semester.  This initial essay included an email that I sent to my current students immediately after their first test.   My assumption has long been that students are most interested in how to do well in a course as they leave the first test.   The email encouraged them to consider two specific aspects of their post-test assessment.  First, if they felt they had not done well, I made three suggestions about what might have gone wrong.   It is hard to improve without some identification of the problem.  Students who do not do as well as they had hoped should come up with an honest ending to this sentence prompt, �I did not do well on the first test because . . .� ...

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...