This Best Practices article outlines 10 tips relative to teaching a course in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). It outlines suggestions for readings, activities, and projects throughout a semester-long undergraduate course. The article addresses how students can learn both the theory and practice of nonviolence by means of readings and activities…

The article describes an assignment that makes writing-to-learn feasible in high-enrollment statistics classes. It combines the principles of structured writing with Bloom's taxonomy. The assignment helped improve related exam scores and was easy to implement and grade for instructors.

So-called survey courses have been a persistent but contested genre in world languages, especially in regard to "the canon," an unstable concept that has historically determined the textual choices of such surveys. This article presents a case study for redesigning the survey course genre in line with theory to diversify, decolonize, and…

I retired from teaching in August, 2018. In the fall semester of that academic year, I taught a section of Basic Writing (now called "Workshop in Composition"), one of the courses I taught in the fall of 1975, my first year at the University of Pittsburgh. This essay is a documentary account of that course, including writing assignments…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a self-assessment assignment which details how an industry analysis and manager interview can be used to provide a realistic perspective of a student's desired future management position. In this assignment students conduct a comprehensive analysis of the industry and position which they desire to hold in…

A typical mathematics assignment consists of one or two dozen practice problems relating to the same skill or concept, yet empirical evidence suggests that there is little or no long-term benefit from working more than a few problems of the same kind in immediate succession. Alternatively, randomized experiments in the laboratory and classroom…

In a matter of weeks--and in some cases, days--teachers were asked to move the remainder of their semester-long, in-person courses to the online environment, restructuring assignments and methods of content delivery along the way. Now, we live in-between, as people have navigated hybrid, stops and re-starts. What helped us then can help us in the…

Among different transitions that happen in a young person's life, transition to adulthood can be one of the most challenging. The new post-school environment requires increased self-determination, including self-awareness, self-advocacy, self-management, and other important skills that help one function as an independent adult. Because it takes…

The ability to communicate scientific concepts to expert and nonexpert audiences is an essential skill for chemistry and STEM students. Current chemistry curricula mainly focus on developing skills to communicate technical information to expert audiences, while relaying the same information to general audiences receives much less attention.…

The following teaching brief outlines ways for advertising and public relations educators to discuss gender pay equity in the classroom. We know that educators are asked to teach about matters of diversity; yet many faculty members do not have adequate resources to do so. Faculty can rely on data and reports, but there are few hands-on activities…

This article describes a classroom activity developed by two teacher educators to support pre-service teachers in integrating culturally responsive teaching practices with reading methods instruction. The activity tasks pre-service teachers to select culturally authentic children's texts and design read-alouds that engage elementary students in…

"The Teaching Archive" shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up "the teaching archive"--the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments--of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot,…

Purpose: The goal of this session is to provide an in-depth account of the history and development of contract cheating in Canada over the past 50+ years. You will also learn about the one and only (failed) attempt at legislation to make ghostwritten essays and exams illegal in Canada. Method: The content of this session is drawn from Eaton's book…

Building on an initiative of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, Washington State University faculty have worked to develop more effective integrative capstone assignments in ways that support ongoing improvement.

For students to thrive and achieve at high levels, they must be interested and emotionally invested in their learning. Why? Because motivation, or the desire that propels one to do something, leads to engagement, where students are being attentive to their tasks, putting forth positive effort, persisting through challenges, and advancing their…