Here we are: the point in the semester where many a dedicated instructor quails before the giant stack of papers on his or her desk. If your students are handing in their papers only a day or two before they leave campus, writing carefully considered comments can feel like putting a message in a bottle.…
Last Friday, hundreds of Harvard faculty, administrators, and graduate students gathered in the Northwest Building to celebrate and criticize higher education. As the first public manifestation of the recent $40 million gift by Gustave and Rita Hauser that established the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT), the HILT Symposium launched a high-profile effort to make…
Several recent news stories focused attention on the closely interrelated issues, in higher education, of technological innovation, rising costs, academic elitism, and personal, individualized small-class instruction. Apple entered the digital textbook market (prompting some skepticism); President Obama addressed the cost of higher education in his State of the Union Address; MIT announced that it would…
What’s in a brain? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lang offers the first installment of a two-part post on memory: how it really works (hint: it’s not the long-outmoded tripartite model—long-term, short-term, and sensory—on which many faculty members still base their pedagogy), and how it might inform the way we teach. Some elementary schools are…
In the news this week: the “flipped” classroom, in which the homework assignment is to watch a video of a lecture, and students spend class time working through the kinds of exercises that normally constitute “homework,” with their peers and their teacher available to help. The flipped classroom raises questions about the value of, and…
This week, a few thoughts about classroom complexity and positive ways to handle it. For one thing, it’s important that the students themselves play a major role in addressing complexity. A select group of Montgomery Public School 5th graders are participating in a wildly successful peer mediation program. In L.A., middleschoolers addressed the issue of cyberbullying…
In The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch reviews two books on opposite sides of the school reform debate, and in the process passionately advocates for more nuanced attention to all of the factors that affect student performance. So what are some of the factors affecting student (and faculty) performance? There’s grade inflation: Inside Higher…
The Bok Blog 