Faculty Development, Hochschuldidaktik, Play and Creativity in Higher Education, SoTL
Learning Spaces When you undertake a biggish research project, such as a PhD, there will be topics that are like Alpine Marmots. You technically know they are there. You know they can randomly pop-up, unexpectedly, surprisingly, and twitch their little noses right in your face. However, these Alpine Marmot topics make only marginal appearances throughout … Continue reading Learning Space—An Alpine Marmot
Voice Problems in Teaching I am writing this post to share my experiment: ‘going to a voice coach’. Just in case you have similar issues to mine and may have wondered … However, if the topic sounds mind-numbingly boring, look at the following photo instead: Moon Moon is back! For a year or so I … Continue reading Getting a Voice Make-Over
and I cannot apply because Education within the HEA is under Social Sciences and not Humanities. But this post is not about wallowing in self-pity about having to miss a most interesting sounding conference, but about the unusual perspectives the conference theme offers lecturers in HEI. I pinched the conference introduction so you know what I am … Continue reading HEA—A Monster Conference
Can ‘real life situations’ be recreated in social media? When I ran the exam preparation buffet a couple of weeks ago, the greatest ‘take away’ for the students seemed to have been peer support and getting advice from students who were from higher years. For instance the 2nd year student providing crucial tips on institute … Continue reading From classroom to tweet?
Reflections on participating in our annual Learning & Teaching Showcase (you will find the poster on page two). Prevent students from developing bad habits. That is pretty much the aim of my 1st year academic development module. For my poster I used the cliché of ‘long thin induction’. Clichés have the advantage that at least everyone … Continue reading Prevent students from developing bad habits.
Exam Preparation and Coping with Stress Living a bilingual life gives me the very annoying super-power to see beyond words, for instance: exam diet. Oxford English Dictionary explains that ‘diet’ describes activities ‘in which a person or group habitually engages’.* However, my superpower enables me to completely ignore the contextualised meaning and jump straight to … Continue reading Exam Buffet for Exam Diet
The topic: teaching as a high risk profession keeps emerging this year, creating a strange pattern of forced reflection. It became particularly prevalent a couple of weeks ago, when for the first time in months a student challenged me during a seminar. Teaching a high risk profession: or not? Most of you will not know … Continue reading Teaching is a High Risk Profession
Auracalia have been my penultimate proxies. Observing these fossil trees can have you time-travel to prehistoric times and spaces. An aspect from my undergraduate studies meandered into my awareness recently: the idea that educational institutions (are supposed to) provide a safe space for learners to try out for ‘real life’ situations. An idea I try … Continue reading Proxies and ‘as if’ to establish ‘real-life context’
The final exercise in the feedback session was: Evaluation forms—revisited. At the end of each module (or sometimes when I am developing new sessions at the end of a session) I hand out feedback forms asking the students very focused and often slightly leading questions about their experience of my teaching. So to keep up … Continue reading Feedback—Fed Back
This week raising awareness of feedback, the different forms of feedback and its impact on the students’ academic as well as professional development was on the agenda. I wanted to ensure the students would gain some understanding of how feedback works not only from their perspective but also from the perspective of academic staff. Yes, … Continue reading Feedback Rules!
Teaching plagiarism and referencing can be boring not only for the students but also for the lecturer. However, my colleagues had a brilliant idea! Last year they created a clicker session; alternating information about plagiarism and referencing with quiz questions the students could answer via a voting system. It works really well, particularly when being … Continue reading Plagiarism, Referencing and Pop Quiz Traps
Making students truly understand the difference between summarizing (as establishing the essence, the key messages of a text) and paraphrasing (as rewording someone’s ideas, or arguments into ones own words), is rather difficult. So I needed some help, and recruited YouTube. Before I delved into explaining differences between summarizing and paraphrasing, I made the students … Continue reading Paraphrasing versus Summarizing
Using Balloons to Explore Argument Structures at Master Level So I wanted master students in the College of Social Sciences to understand the basic argument structure from premise to conclusion. Experiencing that it is not in all cases a straight forward logical structure. The Prep Work I found journal articles that are relevant to the … Continue reading Mastering Balloons
I follow a myriad of pages and groups online perpetually looking for ideas, incentives, challenges and anything and everything that could inform my work. One of my favourites is: http://www.brainpickings.org/ The ten rules for teachers and students easily translate into the context of higher education. The picture below is from the latest blog-post. Rule 1 … Continue reading Department Rules: My ‘Brain Pickings’ Favourite
Using museum’s techniques for teaching got me hooked, I am completely revamping my workshops and lectures. This year, I will have some rather big classes, in which group work and a dialogue with students will become near to impossible. The Problem Experiential (of course) one of the most difficult things to ask a first and … Continue reading More Adventures in Teaching Undergrads
Adventures in Academic Development 