Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

With anticipation each fall, faculty look forward to a new year on campus: new courses to teach, new teaching strategies to try, and a whole new group of students. In addition to the returning students faculty have not met before, many of the new faces faculty see each new semester are college [...]

Happy Earth Day!
Greener living has increasingly become a central issue in American life. In our personal lives, we recycle, use reusable bags at the grocery store, and light our homes with CFL bulbs. However, what can we do to make our teaching practices environmentally friendly? There are many simple changes faculty and instructors can make [...]

This Friday, April 10, 2009 we will be facilitating an open online discussion about online teaching from Noon – 1pm CDT. At NIU we’ve offered face-to-face online teaching brown bag sessions in the past but this will be our first attempt at holding such informal discussions online. We’re not limiting the discussion to just NIU [...]

What is microteaching?

Why wait for student evaluations to receive feedback on teaching practices? Microteaching provides an opportunity for faculty and teaching assistants to improve their teaching practices through a “teach, critique, re-teach” model. Microteaching is valuable for both new and experienced faculty to hone their teaching practices. It is often used in pre-service teacher training [...]

Teaching Through Key Questions

Asking students challenging and thought-provoking questions encourages students to tap their existing mental models and build upon previous knowledge. Faculty can ask key questions to get students to see the relevance of a topic. In turn, it is hoped that students will then ask follow-up questions, engaging in dialogue while [...]