Essays on teaching excellence

The Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network, a national organization focused on faculty and TA development, recently made Volume 21 of their Teaching Excellence Essay series available online. Volume 21 consists of eight short and succinct scholarly essays that present innovative viewpoints on college and university instruction. Below are links to this year’s essays, […]

Graphical display of student learning outcomes

The ProfHacker blog* at the Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting post last week by Billie Hara, an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University and one of ProfHacker’s regular contributors. Hara described her use of simple graphics to organize and display the relationships between her course’s student learning outcomes and the course […]

Better prepared students, more participation

Will Wilson (Duke Biology) wanted to engage his students and have them come to class prepared, having read the text.  He wanted the class meetings to go beyond the text, and include more student discussion. He’s incorporated two new features in his course this year to achieve these goals: reading quizzes and minute papers […]

Planning student video assignments

As we approach the end of the semester, you’re probably thinking about your spring courses.  If you’re planning on having students complete a video based assignment in your course, or if you’re wondering if a student video assignment would help you reach some of your course learning goals, there are many resources at Duke for […]

Responsive teaching

Recently, John Willis (Professor of Biology) assigned several chapters of the book “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne to his Biology 102 (Genetics and Evolution) students. Based on student comments, he decided to invite the author to talk with students via Skype in the classroom.