I have so many thoughts swirling in my brain today, mostly because I’ve been consuming information at a faster-than-normal clip (thanks to all the driving I’ve done in the last week — more than 32 hours in the car over seven days). But for a #100DaysToFall post, I pulled out a book I read over …
We only control what we don’t trust. Glennon Doyle As my last post indicated, I’ve been traveling this week — first to (attempt to) visit my brother in Kansas City, then on to my parents’ house in northern Arkansas. I hadn’t seen family since Christmas 2019, in the before-COVID times, so this has been a …
Ostensibly about teaching, this #100DaysToFall series has been a delightful daily challenge to muse over what a teaching-obsessed college professor’s summer life looks like. For the most part, it looks nearly identical to the middle-of-the-semester life, save formal class meetings and the endless waves of guilt for not giving students feedback more quickly. I spend …
Yesterday, I wrote about how I came to be an invited speaker (!!) at this year’s Teaching Professor Conference, which kicks off in just a couple of weeks. Today, I’m going to talk about the actual content of these TPC talks — how my thinking about teaching has been evolving over these last couple of …
I wanted to share a little bit about the two presentations I’ll be giving in early June as part of the Teaching Professor Conference — a small portion of which is ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN PERSON (!!!) in New Orleans. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, but today I thought I’d write a little about the …
On Thursday, right around the time a short line of students, faculty, and the college president were about to process into our campus gym for the 20-something-th commencement of the week, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear a mask indoors to protect themselves from COVID-19 (the disease, not the …
I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking lately about incomplete grades. Namely, this: How many incomplete grades can and/or should an instructor award before it becomes excessive? As I started thinking about this blog post a few days ago, I did some Googling around to see if there were other like-minded academics mulling over …
On Monday, I wrote about my initial forays into ungrading in the spring semester; yesterday, I thought about some lessons learned in that effort. Today, I want to focus more on the nitty-gritty aspects of how I piloted this strategy last semester, with some very specific examples of how I implemented an ungrading-inspired (but not …
Yesterday, I wrote about my initial foray into ungrading, inspired by the fabulous collection of essays Susan Blum edited, Ungrading. Today, I’m excited to share some lessons learned from my spring experimentations, ones that are particularly meaningful as I start planning for my summer semester, fully online course, which begins June 1. A look back …
Over my winter break, I read Ungrading, a collection of essays on the hows and whys of implementing this feedback-centered pedagogy in college classes (edited by the brilliant Susan Blum). It was then hot off the presses, and I devoured the book in a matter of a few days, armed with a highlighter, a stack …
