Month: February 2019
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How to Make Writing Less Scary for Students
Writing is scary for pretty much everyone. For example, I as I write this sentence, I can’t help but worry that… The bulk of our students likely face these same fears, and a great many of them also likely face other fears, ranging from worries that they don’t measure up to their classmates, to anxiety…
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Want to Significantly Improve Your Feedback to Students? Stop Giving It in Isolation
The lecture long dominated the classroom. The concept behind it was simple. Teachers have information and students don’t. So the teachers give information to the students, who have the choice to absorb the information or not. These days we understand that there are often better approaches than to just throw information at students. We know…
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Why We Should Separate Grades and Feedback
Grading and feedback are often conflated. For nearly a decade I used the term “grading” as a synonym for nearly any type of response to writing without so much as flinching, but I know now that they are actually very different and in some ways opposing activities. Grades are where we rank students by placing…
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Why We Should Let Students In On Our Pedagogy
This last semester I unwittingly began what has turned out to be a rather surprising pedagogical experiment. In short, over my career I have generally tried to keep my teaching and my writing about teaching lives separate. The reasoning behind this was pretty simple. I assumed that my students would have little interest in learning…
Matthew M. Johnson 