Tea for Teaching

New Faculty Transition

New faculty often come out of graduate programs that have trained them to be researchers but not teachers. The transition into full time teaching can be stressful and overwhelming for these colleagues. Maggie Schmuhl, a new faculty member in the Public Justice Department at SUNY-Oswego joins us to discuss how she has embraced evidence-based methods in her practice as a teacher.

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Online learning

Enrollment in online classes has grown steadily over the last few decades. Today, over 30% of college students enroll in at least one online course. In this episode, we discuss the evolution of  and possible future directions of online learning with Greg Ketcham, the Assistant Dean of the Division of Extended Learning at SUNY Oswego. 

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com

 

The Active Learning Initiative at Cornell

In this episode, we discuss Cornell's Active Learning Initiative with Doug McKee, an economist at Cornell and a co-host of the Teach Better podcast.  This initiative, designed to increase the use of active learning in instruction at Cornell, provides funding to departments to hire postdocs to redesign courses relying on evidence-based active learning techniques.  Doug provides an overview of the program and a discussion of how this program is being implemented to transform economics classes. We also discuss Doug's plans to include two-stage exams and invention activities in his econometrics class.

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Mobile Technology in the Classroom

Smartphones, laptops and tablets can be useful learning tools in the classroom; they can also be a source of distraction. In this episode, we discuss alternative policies that faculty and students might adopt to facilitate learning. Recent research on the relative effectiveness of handwritten vs. digital notetaking is also examined.

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at: http://teaforteaching.com

Evidence-based teaching in large classes.

Effective teaching requires good classroom management skills, engaging public speaking skills, and the use of evidence-based teaching strategies. All of this can be particularly daunting while teaching large-enrollment classes. In this episode, Bill Goffe, describes how his instructional approaches in large economic classes have evolved over time, in response to findings from cognitive science and educational research.

Bill Goffe is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Penn State and a former colleague at the State University of New York at Oswego.  Bill is very well known in the profession for his Resources for Economists on the Internet, which was one of the very first internet guides available for economists (and is now hosted and sponsored by the American Economic Association). He is the Secretary-Treasurer for the Society of Computational Economics , an Associate Editor for Computational Economics and the online section of the Journal of Economic Education. He's also an editorial board member for Netnomics.  

A transcript and show notes are available at teaforteaching.com