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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Teaching Tips From Your TCC


Today’s tip, written by Kevin Brown, comes directly from the current issue of The Teaching Professor. All faculty and staff have free access to the online newsletter this year, thanks to Kate Schiefen, DCC Dean of Academic Services. Information about how to get the newsletter follows the tip.

Quick Feedback, Engaged Students

We often wonder what we can do to help students engage with the material so they can learn it at a deeper level. Students don’t make that an easy task. Here are three ways I try to provide feedback that engages students and not overwhelm myself with grading tasks in the process.

Start-Up Anxiety

I have often said to my friends who don’t teach that the week before fall classes begin is a tough time for me. The students are coming back and the campus is abuzz. They are moving into the residence halls, meeting new people, and getting ready to start a new year. They are all revved up. It’s like a party—actually, in many places, it is a party just before classes, and then the work of the semester starts.

Teaching Metacognition Implicitly

Metacognition is about being able to successfully plan, monitor, and evaluate your learning. It’s not a skill that can be listed as a strength by most of our students. Few have encountered themselves as learners. They don’t have an expansive repertoire of study strategies. They don’t often think about alternatives when the studying isn’t going all that well. And most don’t evaluate how well they learned beyond the grade they receive. It’s something else that concerned teachers need to worry about while teaching students.

Teaching the Skills that Make Students Employable

Whether you teach in a university or a community college, in a university transfer program or in a terminal occupational degree program, you know how important it is to prepare students to be good employees. The community advisory committees that work with us on our programs ask that, in addition to teaching the “hard” knowledge skills needed, we work to develop students’ “soft” employability skills.

Ten Things We Wish We Knew about Leadership before Stepping into the Classroom

We did it! We survived the application process, the grueling interviews, and the countless introductions. Finally, it was time to step into the classroom and share our passion and knowledge of medical laboratory science. We were ready to prepare students for associates’ degrees to become medical laboratory technicians, and we thought it would be easy. We had carefully prepared. Our textbooks were ready, our syllabi were done, and our labs were set up. What we found, however, were two teachers skilled in the area of laboratory medicine but lacking in teacher leadership experience. Here’s what we learned from our first teaching experience and what we wish we’d known before we stepped into the classroom.

What Components Make Group Work Successful?

There’s lots of research documenting the positive effects of group experiences on learning outcomes. We’ve highlighted many of these studies in previous issues of the newsletter. Less is known about the specific aspects of group experiences that contribute to their overall positive impact. Thomas Tomcho and Rob Foels decided to explore this question by looking at the research on group learning in the field of psychology, as reported in the journal Teaching of Psychology.

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Julie Damerell
Transitional Studies
11/19/2012