One of Kevin Gannon’s favorite class discussion activities doesn’t involve much talking. Inspired by complete-the-story games in which players each write a line of a tale that builds off a previous ...

As an undergraduate, I took a seminar dedicated entirely to Ulysses by James Joyce. Joyce’s modernist novel is mystifying, so question marks hung on the ends of students’ contributions. As we ...

KQED's Mindshift podcast visits a language arts classroom where an extroverted teacher has developed creative ways of inviting introverted students to share their thinking. When students head back to ...

At some point in their career, every teacher will find themselves having a difficult discussion with their students. My first took place not long after I began teaching. It involved one of my students ...

Students may generate questions that are off-topic or not scientifically useful if given too much latitude in inquiry-based ...

Middle school English teacher Brett Vogelsinger wasn’t always attuned to the needs of introverts. As an extrovert himself, he found it easy to raise his hand and be vocal in school. So when he became ...

When I first started teaching, my attitude toward students who remained silent in discussion classes could be summed up with the words of Bernard Hopkins, the fistic sage of Philadelphia: “Bernard ...

L ectures are boring. Assignments are busy work. And all of that tuition is for this? When Justin Shaffer hears these kinds of complaints from students, he thinks they have a point. He also thinks ...

Asking students to dissect the motivations of a character in a book is doing more than teaching them about plot and characterization. This exercise also helps students learn to see different ...

It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: ...

I read with interest Anna Broadbent’s essay on the benefits and pitfalls of class participation grades. From my perch as a provost, former dean and former department chair, I find that the grade for ...