To write dirty, you have to know what clean is (page 70) Finding relevancy in the news (page 84) Forcing students to make an informed choice (page 99)
When asked, “What’s your elevator pitch for higher education?” Cornell University Professor of Economics Robert Frank
offered an explanation that underscored the significance of critical thinking:"When you meet somebody who’s well
trained in critical thinking, it’s immediately apparent to you. We’re living in a world now where people can doctor
photographs. They can shout fake news. They can spin a conspiracy theory. If you’re not equipped to think skeptically
about the arguments people make to you, then you’re ever more at risk in the environment we inhabit now."Critical
thinking has become the central topic of many higher education conversations. And just as Elvis pushed for “a little
less conversation, a little more action,” so has academia. The purpose of this book is to provide a venue for that
action, to allow our colleagues from across the country to share what works for them.Simply put, the academy must
become better at instilling critical thinking so that for graduates it becomes a habit of mind.In this book, the
twelfth in our “It Works for Me Series,” you will find the selections are more evidence-based and focused than
when we began twenty years ago, and our contributors seem to be applying more critical thinking to their own writing.
Improving course plans via standardized committee review (page 13) Team work does not have to be a bad thing (page 63) Highlight your student’s work: Art show (but not by artists)! (page 132)
High impact practices are a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but if you've read any of the authors' books,
you know, for instance, that for many years they have been collaborating, instructing undergraduates how to
research like full professors, and teaching writing intensive courses—in short, employing some high impact
practices, even though, back then, they were merely effective teaching strategies.
What impresses the authors the most about HIPs is that they have been rigorously assessed, and no doubt remains
that they work, resulting in deeper learning. Moreover, what started as a top-ten practices list has already
grown to eleven with the demonstrated efficacy of the e-portfolio. And that list will surely grow as more and
more research is performed.
For this title, there is one point the authors would like to stress: No law exists that prevents you from using
more than one HIP at a time in a learning experience. In fact, as their PLC experience proved, piggybacking the
HIPs makes them even more effective, or, as Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be . . . wonderful."
This book provides a descriptive, progressive narrative on the flipped classroom including its history,
connection to theory, structure, and strategies for implementation. Important questions to consider when
evaluating the purpose and effectiveness of flipping are answered. The book also highlights case studies of
flipped higher education classrooms within five different subject areas. Each case study is similarly
structured to highlight the reasons behind flipping, principles guiding flipped instructions,
strategies used, and lessons learned. An appendix that contains lesson plans, course schedules, and
descriptions of specific activities is also included.
Building Institutional Support for SoTL (page 56) Try out your new pedagogy. Find out it works. Share it with the world. Hold on! Not so fast… (page 58)
The authors wrote this book, the tenth in their “It Works for Me” Series, to encourage scholars to attempt
to produce the fastest growing form of research, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL. The
collection begins with their essay on the rapid growth of this form from one of Boyer’s four types of
scholarship to today’s SoTL, and they even provide a succinct rationale for attempting such scholarship,
including personal discussions on the best articles they have written on the subject. The next section in
the book covers historical and theoretical perspectives on the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Following that, another section offers actual tips for the production of SoTL, which is followed by a section
describing some SoTL projects. The authors then put forth a step-by-step guide to help you with a SoTL project
and conclude with their speculations on future developments in this form.
Helping students identify a healthy learning environment (page 97) Asking novice computer programmers to reflect on their experience writing code (page 131)
Metacognition reveals teaching and learning to students with a focus on teaching students how to apply
learning strategies. Perhaps most importantly, though, metacognitive approaches offer strategies for
encouraging students to reflect not only on what they learned but how they learned it.
Introducing Computer Science majors to (the lack of) diversity and inclusivity (page 29)
Meaningful conversations about race, diversity, and inclusion can be surprisingly rare occurrences in higher
education classrooms. Students and faculty alike, especially those in the majority, often fear saying the
wrong thing, so they say nothing at all and hope the moment passes without too much discomfort. When issues
around diversity become unavoidable, faculty often feel ill-equipped to address them effectively.
"Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom" is a free, downloadable special report featuring 20 articles
from faculty teaching at a wide range of institutions throughout the United States and Canada. The articles
tackle some of the trickiest challenges in creating an inclusive and respectful learning environment for a
community of learners that is growing increasingly diverse.
Historically, I assigned points to assignments,
and determined course grades based on the
percentage of points a learner earned. This
meant that a learner could do poorly on some
assignments and great on others, and effectively
generated an "average ...
The goal of this work is to motivate and reward
students for engaging in activities that we
believe are important for lifelong learners. We
are interested in activities that do not follow
the simple, closed-form pattern that is common
in most college-...
To prepare graduates for today's work
environment, they must be immersed in positive
(and perhaps negative) small group experiences
in their courses, which will in turn provide a
basic understanding of how teams form and
develop over time. In the fall
...
We explored how software development teams form
and interact in a computer science college
course setting and what an instructor can do to
enhance effective teamwork. The experiences of
computer science college course's teams are
compared and contrasted ...
DynaTable is an extension for the MediaWiki
software that provides support for structured
data. While tables and lists are popular
features in many wikis, they are currently
unsupported as first-class entities. As a
consequence, creating and editing ...
I have had the pleaseure of serving as the faculty mentor for the following students while they completed their Honors Thesis. Click the links and have a read. You just might learn something.
Need something to read? Here's my full curriculum vita,
and a brief version of it. It
has a few interesting tidbits in it, but most of you will likely find it farily boring.
Need something even longer to read? Here's my Master's thesis.
NOTICE: The information presented on this page represents the personal views, ideas, and opinions of the author.
This is not an official Ball State University web page. Links contained at this web site to other organizations are
presented as a service and neither constitute nor imply university endorsement or warranty.
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