Early this year, after the pandemic had moved my classroom online, a student asked if we could try “silent meetings” in a course I was teaching. At first I assumed that, like many of us, he was just ...

A few years ago, we hired an adjunct professor to teach a three-hour night class. After a few weeks, he came to us in frustration because he couldn’t get the students to discuss the material, and when ...

One of Kevin Gannon’s favorite class discussion activities doesn’t involve much talking. Inspired by complete-the-story games in which players each write a line of a tale that builds off a previous ...

Discussion is a large part of teaching and learning. We want to see and hear our learners engaged in conversations about the course content, making connections to their lives or to other aspects of ...

Few psychologists would claim that the lecture is dead but those who aspire to be good or even great teachers rely on this method less than their own teachers did. What’s taken its place? Engaging ...

So the day of the text-based discussion has arrived and all of the students have had time to think about their ideas, write them down and pair-share in preparation for a vibrant and meaningful student ...

My research on teaching and learning in higher education began when I was hired as a graduate assistant at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, at Northwestern University, back in the late 1990s ...