We all know this isn’t true. Is there a person alive who hasn’t suffered through a class taught by an expert who was boring? And yet, it seems to me that we are reluctant to acknowledge that “emotion” can support or suppress learning. We focus on covering the material instead … Read More
Tag: The Spark of Learning
“You want to aim for what D’Mello and colleagues call a ‘zone of optimal confusion.’”
D’Mello and his research team identified three guiding principles for implementing confusion in the college classroom: it should be appropriate, intentional and in the context of learning; students should possess the ability to successfully resolve the confusion; and when students can’t resolve it on their own, there should be appropriate … Read More
“Students rated sociability (e.g., friendliness, warmth) as significantly more important than did faculty.”
A 2014 study by Megan Gerhardt evaluated how instructors and students ranked contributors to teaching credibility. While everyone agreed that competence in subject matter and character are most important, students noted a desire for sociability that “has important implications for the classroom experience.” As Sarah Cavanagh observes, “one route … Read More
Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books
This blog focuses on one idea from one book each week, and so selecting just five from the 50 or so that I’ve published in 2016 is a challenge. But after looking through them all, I have to say that the ideas that I enjoyed the most from the books … Read More
“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”
In The Spark of Learning, Sarah Rose Cavanagh describes a study where students were asked to rate professors after seeing 30-second videos of lectures that had no audio. The students’ ratings predicted with surprising accuracy the professors’ actual end-of-semester evaluations. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that in teaching … Read More