HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

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Faculty Mentoring Undergraduates: The Nature, Development, and Benefits of Mentoring Relationships

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of a work that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To read the article in its entirety, visit the Teaching & Learning Inquiry website. http://tlijournal.com/tli/index.php/TLI/article/view/125/77
Educational research shows that close student-faculty interaction is a key factor in college student learning and success. Most literature on undergraduate mentoring, however, focuses on planned programs of mentoring for targeted groups of students by non-faculty professionals or student peers. Based on the research literature and student and faculty testimony from a residential liberal arts college, this article shows that unplanned “natural” mentoring can be crucial to student learning and development and illustrates some best practices. It advances understanding of faculty mentoring by differentiating it from teaching, characterizing several functional types of mentoring, and identifying the phases through which a mentoring relationship develops. Arguing that benefits to students, faculty, and institutions outweigh the risks and costs of mentoring, it is written for faculty who want to be better mentors and provides evidence that administrators should value and reward mentoring.

Elizabeth McKinsey, PhD June 27, 2016

Lecture vs. Active Learning: Reframing the Conversation

Exchanges about the relative merits of lecture and active learning continue, and these exchanges are becoming more acrimonious and polarized. Either you are for lecturing (and against active learning) or you’re for active learning (and against lecturing). Active learning advocates have the evidence; those who lecture stand on tradition. Where is this debate headed? How accurately does it reflect what’s actually happening in classrooms? Is there a viable place in the middle?

Mary Bart June 24, 2016

What Does Student Engagement Look Like?

Engagement. . .it’s another one of those words that’s regularly bandied about in higher education. We talk about it like we know what it means and we do, sort of. It’s just that when a word or idea is so widely used, thinking about it often stops and that’s what I think has happened with engagement.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 22, 2016

female student outside of college building

Getting Started with Service-Learning

We are doing some (late) spring cleaning to the Mentor Commons. Removing the oldest programs as we continue to add new ones. This 20-Minute Mentor is from 2010, so while the technology looks a little dated, the content remains highly relevant. We’ll continue to add more programs that we’re retiring from video library throughout the next few months.

If you’re looking for guidance on integrating service-learning into a new or existing course, you find it in this 20-Minute Mentor from Magna Publications.

Mary Bart June 17, 2016

College professor speaking with students

Benefits of Talking with Students about Mid-Course Evaluations

It takes a certain amount of courage to talk with students about course evaluation results. I’m thinking here more about formative feedback the teacher solicits during the course, as opposed to what’s officially collected when it ends. Despite how vulnerable revealing results can make a teacher feel, there are some compelling reasons to have these conversations and a powerful collection of benefits that may result from doing so.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 15, 2016

Managing In-Class Learning Experiences in Flipped Classrooms

In this ongoing series focused on flipped and active-learning classrooms, we’re taking a deeper look into how to create successful learning experiences for students. We’ve examined how to encourage students to complete pre-class work, how to hold students accountable for pre-class work, and how to connect pre-class work to in-class activities. Now let’s focus on the challenge of managing the in-person learning environment.

Barbi Honeycutt, PhD June 13, 2016

The Phases of Inquiry-Based Teaching

A central goal of education is teaching critical-thinking skills. Inquiry-based teaching is an excellent path to this goal. Based partly on the philosophy that “humans are born inquirers,” the method focuses on student discovery over pushing information from the instructor. Along the way, the students explore multiple sources and contexts, ask questions and pursue hypotheses, and work to apply their theories to new and diverse situations. In doing this, they actively discover the interrelatedness among concepts, topics, and theories.

Eric Kyle, PhD June 10, 2016

Tweets from the 2016 Teaching Professor Conference

Year after year, college faculty mark the end to the spring term by attending The Teaching Professor Conference. It’s the perfect venue to reflect, recharge, and rejuvenate while gaining a wealth of instructional ideas and valuable insights.

This Storify provides a collection of some of the tweets from the three-day event.

Mary Bart June 9, 2016

Are We Too Preoccupied with Teaching Techniques?

College teachers love techniques. If you’re invited to lead a teaching workshop, you can expect to be asked, “Will you share some good techniques?” Suggest them in the workshop and watch lots of smiling participants write them down with great enthusiasm. Why do we love teaching techniques so much? Because many of us come to teaching not having many? Because they work? Because they keep our teaching feeling fresh?

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 8, 2016

Frame Your Feedback: Making Peer Review Work in Class

We often hear that peer review is an excellent opportunity for reciprocal student learning. In theory, this makes sense. Since an instructor can only dedicate a certain amount of attention to each student, peer review allows students to receive more feedback and engage more frequently in the content they are learning. Research shows this benefits both the students who receive and provide feedback.

Christina Moore June 6, 2016

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