Reading Time: 2 minutesStart with the students rather than the discipline: this is the 3rd principle from Ken Bain’s book, “What the Best College Teachers Do” (pp. 110-112): …the best teachers start with something that, as [Harvard political theories Michael] Sandel put it, “students care about, know, or think they know… Such an approach often means asking students to […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesClass Ice Breakers Polar bears break the ice to survive. Teachers break the ice to thrive. Join this interactive, high-energy webinar and explore ways to use icebreakers and topic starters to socialize, stimulate, motivate, and prime your students for success. Participants will leave with practical strategies they can immediately implement to move students from passive […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesMany faculty like to use photos in their presentations, but finding images that are open to the public is difficult and of course we want to model to our students the ethical use of web images. Here are some suggestions. 1. Google Search Many faculty get their images from a Google search and you can […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesJanet Mizrahi is a continuing lecturer of professional writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also an author at BizCommBuzz. As if COVID-19 weren’t ugly enough, we are now seeing another offshoot of the pandemic’s effect: xenophobia. Before so many campuses shut down, students and instructors were understandably edgy about every […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesStudents know how it feels: you spend hours crafting the perfect email—and then nothing. You refresh and refresh, check on your phone, laptop, and desktop. We know how it feels. Here are three common reasons and suggested responses for each. Sometimes having the language helps, and of course, these can be adjusted to the situation and […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesGood paragraphs are built by using transitional expressions to glue ideas together, creating a logical and cohesive whole. Skilled writers use several techniques to make paragraphs stick together. One such technique is transitional expressions. Transitional Expressions are words and phrases that: add information show time or order clarify show cause and […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesUnfortunately, cheating is alive and well in the college classroom, and it’s a disheartening reality for instructors. After all, cheating flies in the face of the knowledge and values college teachers want to impart to students about the world. Of course, most of the responsibility for honesty lies with students. Nevertheless, instructors can use strategies […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhether to use words or figures to express numbers is governed by convention. That is, we follow customary techniques or rules. Frequently Used Number Rules General rules. Use words for numbers one through ten. (We have ten computers and three printers. She travels 30,000 miles each year.) Beginning of sentence.Never start a sentence with a figure. (Twenty-five candidates applied.) Money. Use figures. (Her ticket cost $699.55, and her luggage […]
