With the beginning of the winter term well under way, many instructors are thinking about course material and how to relate concepts and material to students. As a young instructor, this has always been a concern of mine. Continue reading Relating Through Examples — Julia Woodhall
Humour can be an effective pedagogical tool. This is borne out by a study that I undertook, five years ago, of about a thousand comments that were posted by students to RateMyProfessors.com: a good sense of humour turned out to be among the top five characteristics that undergraduates appreciated in an instructor (the other attributes in the top five were being approachable; Continue reading Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk: Humour as a Teaching Tool — Mark Morton
The Academic Integrity Office is coordinating a collaborative approach to enhance integrity as a core value at the University of Waterloo for students, staff, and faculty. Various academic support units in cooperation with faculty and student representatives created an “Academic Integrity Fact Sheet for Students” that was distributed at the start of the academic term in September 2011. In October, a set of four posters and associated videos were created Continue reading Enhancing Integrity at uWaterloo — Bruce Mitchell & Faye Schultz
Today is January 3, which means that about 30% of all resolutions that were made two days ago have now been abandoned. Whatever motivation we had to strive for self-improvement on New Year’s Day has vanished in a puff of snow. I’m curious as to why this is the case. Every person that I know has, I think, loads of motivation and perseverance for some tasks and goals: my son, for example, will spend hours putting together a complicated Lego set, even missing meals in the process unless we remind him to eat. Continue reading “StickKing” with It: Self and Peer Motivation — Mark Morton
What really makes your gears turn? Recently, I was thinking about a personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), that might help you figure this out. The full test itself is an extensive questionnaire that is designed to classify your personality preferences in four areas in order to help you better understand the way you think and react under different circumstances. I wanted to share it in this blog because I think it can help us to reflect upon and understand our style and preferences as a teacher. For me, understanding my own personality preferences helped me to relate better with my students. Continue reading So what’s your personality? – Martin Smith
The podcast version of the CTE Teaching Tip document called “Group Decision Making” is now available, and you can listen to it via the player at the bottom of this blog posting. If you’d like to access all the Teaching Tips podcasts completed to date, click here. Better yet, you can subscribe to our Teaching Tips Podcasts in iTunes.
To read the original Teaching Tips document, with all of its references and additional resources, go to our Teaching Tips repository.
The podcast version of the CTE Teaching Tip document called “Effective Communication: Barriers and Strategies” is now available. You can listen to it via the player at the bottom of this blog posting or by clicking here. If you want to subscribe to CTE’s Teaching Tips feed in iTunes, click here. To read the original Teaching Tip document, with all of its references and additional resources, click here.