CrossCurrents Library

Inclusive teaching is not easy. It means digging deeper into why imbalances in participation, success, and completion exist. To adopt inclusive pedagogy, instructors necessarily engage in examining their own bias and awareness. In this article, we consider our responsibility, as educators, to practice inclusive teaching, and cover various techniques and methods for doing so.

It’s common knowledge for any educator who has taught online that it can be a significant challenge for students who are learning online to develop feelings of connection with their peers and teacher. Feelings of isolation when learning online have been around for as long as online learning has existed. In this article, we examine three key ways to combat that sense of isolation and encourage meaningful peer interaction.

As colleges and universities look for new ways to improve both student learning and the student experience, blended courses are becoming increasingly common. A combination of onsite and online instruction, there is no single approach to blended learning. With any definition, the key to blended learning is the combination of onsite and online instruction. Educators in different geographic regions have

Months of lectures, activities, group projects, quizzes, readings, and more typically culminate in an end-of-term evaluation. It may be tempting to slip into the default “review for final exam” mode as a term comes to a close as tests can be worthwhile for student learning and retention (see 8 Benefits of Frequent Quizzing and Testing.) However, final projects can prove

Few things strike fear in the hearts of students as much as tests, especially when knowing they will be used for summative assessment. Test anxiety aside, quizzes and tests can actually help students learn course content. Research demonstrates that the testing effect, which is sometimes called test-enhanced learning or retrieval practice, has a greater impact on student learning than simply

We write for many different reasons. Blogging, reporting, journaling, playwriting, scientific writing, opinion writing, recipe writing, songwriting, creative writing, writing for social media—the list of examples could go on and on. Even texting or emailing with friends and family is a near-constant form of writing we may take for granted. Writing is a form of expression, but it can also

At the K. Patricia Cross Academy, our mission is to support faculty with easily accessible online teaching resources. As instruction is increasingly accomplished in an online environment, this edition of CrossCurrents is focused on highlighting some of the previous resources we’ve made available to instructors to aid in their development of successful, high-impact approaches to online teaching.

Reading is a fundamental skill that many of us take for granted, particularly in academia, yet it is essential to student success in and out of the classroom. However, as Thorndike wrote in 1917, reading can be as complex as solving a complex equation: Understanding a paragraph is like solving a problem in mathematics. It consists of selecting the right

College and university students are regularly asked to learn a great deal of content and many skills in their courses, but the learning processes involved are rarely considered or managed on their own. For example, students can find it incredibly difficult to recognize learning gaps or misunderstandings when learning a new concept or process. They don’t always plan out their

As college teachers, we want students to be able to take what they have learned and apply it in a different context. This phenomenon is called the Transfer of Learning, and it involves the application of skills, knowledge, and/or attitudes that were learned in one situation to another learning situation. Every student can benefit from learning in a way that

The COVID-19 pandemic and its surrounding political climate find us all in a time of crisis. Teachers and students alike are often caring for family members, friends, and themselves. It seems simple common sense that students who really care about what they are learning will invest the time and effort required to learn it well and remember it longer. So how do we help students focus their care on learning, during a crisis, during an age of significant distraction?

Active learning has come of age in higher education, with many educators adopting this method of teaching in their courses and with many studies documenting its effectiveness as an instructional approach. But what is active learning anyway? And given the fact that so many of us are teaching online, what does it look like in an online course? Descriptions of