Early this year, after the pandemic had moved my classroom online, a student asked if we could try “silent meetings” in a course I was teaching. At first I assumed that, like many of us, he was just ...

Whenever you lead a class discussion, you naturally want to see your students eagerly participating. It shows they’re engaged, and that’s surely a prerequisite for learning. But too often academics ...

Discussion is a large part of teaching and learning. We want to see and hear our learners engaged in conversations about the course content, making connections to their lives or to other aspects of ...

A few years ago, we hired an adjunct professor to teach a three-hour night class. After a few weeks, he came to us in frustration because he couldn’t get the students to discuss the material, and when ...

One of Kevin Gannon’s favorite class discussion activities doesn’t involve much talking. Inspired by complete-the-story games in which players each write a line of a tale that builds off a previous ...

Few psychologists would claim that the lecture is dead but those who aspire to be good or even great teachers rely on this method less than their own teachers did. What’s taken its place? Engaging ...