For more than twenty years, I have enjoyed teaching a variety of ages and stages from pre-school to college.Read more…
Teaching Tips: My Top 3 Tips
Here are my top three reminders I would do well to apply [to teaching] more regularly.Read more…
Teaching Tips: Listening
Really listening to my students also challenges me to see course material with new eyes—their eyes. It forces me to approach the familiar grounds of knowledge using unfamiliar pathways. At its best moments, listening to my students equalizes us as we become collaborators in the project of learning.Read more…
Teaching Tips: Yearning and Practicalities
When I first started teaching, I would obsessively replay my mistakes, wracking my brain for ways to make up for them next time. I still do. But I also try to remember the advice I received from my first pedagogical mentors: It’s just as important to focus on what you did well so that you can keep doing it.Read more…
Teaching As Relationship (Teaching Tips)
Last summer I was given the opportunity to teach my first college-level class: a senior-level lecture course on the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. I frankly wasn’t that nervous and I went into the course thinking that my job consisted of a simple two-step process where I simply downloaded information into my students’ brains and then challenged them to think critically about the past and its connection to the present. Read more…
Teaching Tips: Grace and Identity
As an undergraduate, I found it very difficult to contribute to class discussions—sometimes I was too shy to speak up, other times I simply couldn’t think of anything to say. The struggle persisted into graduate school, where I pushed myself to participate, but was still frustrated and disappointed in my performance. I suspected that my professors were too.Read more…
Teaching Tips: Growing in Respect, Learning to Fly
Beth Madison shares two things she’s learned about teaching from Ephesians. Read more…
As Christ First Loved Us (Teaching Tips Series)
Every Monday morning, my work week begins the way I always dreamed it would, with chalk hitting the chalk board as I pace in front of thirty something young minds who were befuddled by the reading assignment I gave them over the weekend. Teaching at the university level is not only my dream job; it is also my real life job! Read more…
Teaching Tips: Engineering in the Real World
In my field it is challenging to keep the students motivated, because as they are slogging through the mathematical details and techniques, they constantly wonder to themselves, “Is it worth it? Why am I doing this?” Read more…