Teaching self-authorship and self-regulation: A story of resistance and transformation

Studies show that many learners feel resistant to or otherwise under-prepared for learning challenges due to underdeveloped ability to self-regulate or adapt thoughts, feelings, and actions to attain their own personal goals. This narrative account illustrates pathways and pitfalls in evoking such behavior and encouraging self-authorship—the internal defining of beliefs, identity and relationships. The author describes a project in which an initially resistant student generated creative, if short-lived, solutions to personal struggles. Helpful educational interventions included questioning behavioral patterns, establishing high expectations, and reinforcing belief in ability to change. Oversights and missed opportunities included unintentionally inviting mimicry and remaining ignorant of researched practices for fostering transformation

Using found object visuals to crystallize learning

To help learners consolidate learning before the end of a classroom session, they can be instructed to use found objects at hand to illustrate the most salient ideas they are taking away. Such deliberate veering from verbal language alone provides easy entry to challenging material and a way to capture knowledge using mental channels other than typical verbal-linguistic ones—making learning more likely to be transformative and lasting

Refreshed & Humbled: Altered Assumptions about Power and Payoffs

The author starts with a focus on a long-term, shifting relationship with work-study students serving as students consultants in his class, then takes an outward turn as he describes how he included graduate student voices from around the country as he wrote an external grant to support partnerships between research and teaching intensive institutions

The role of the facilitator in faculty learning communities: Paving the way for growth,productivity, and collegiality

Effective facilitation is essential to creating and sustaining an environment in which faculty learning communities can thrive. Just as faculty learning communities differ qualitatively from other familiar work groups in higher education, the role of the facilitator differs from what are perhaps more familiar roles of content expert, lecturer, chairperson, or traditional leader. The authors explore the nature of facilitation; outline important facilitative attitudes, skills, and tasks; and consider a number of key concepts about adult learners and collaborative learning as well as group development and dynamics that can shed light on the experience from the point of view of a facilitator

Dangerous pedagogy

Using data primarily drawn from undergraduate psychology classes, we reflect upon what humane but dangerous pedagogy illustrates about our teaching and our students\u27 learning