Easy Student Engagement: Name Dropping

This teaching tip is courtesy of the junk mail that piles up on my kitchen table. When the pile gets too large to ignore, I sort through it and toss uninteresting junk mail in the trash.

My husband asks me why I don’t just throw it all away.

Well, some catalogs I might be able to cut up to use as conversation starters or metaphors in class. Some flyers I might be able to use in my mass media class to teach a persuasive print advertising technique.

And let’s face it: I like the pieces that call me by name.

Word Sort: An Active Learning Critical-Thinking Strategy

Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich – unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone

Teaching Strategies that Work for Students Who Have Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Teachers know: there’s no magic bullet. What works well with some students doesn’t work well with others. However, the closest we come to the magic are those golden, research-based teaching strategies that work well with most students.

Researchers Vannest, Temple-Harvey, and Mason reviewed 20 studies about teaching strategies that work well with students who have emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). They didn’t find a magic bullet or Shangri-la. They found those rock-solid teaching strategies that work with all students, but work especially well with the EBD population.

Federal Budget Lesson Plan: Online Interactive Game Lets Students Make Federal Budget Decisions

Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have created Budget Hero, an engaging online game that challenges users to balance the federal budget (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2008/05/budget_hero/). The game relies on numbers and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and offers users options for balancing the budget like cutting aid to foreign governments or increasing the retirement age to 67.