Here’s something I wrote up today as a basic guide for holding debates in online courses. Not sure how many people plan to do this, but it’s worth thinking about how to create and structure engaging and interesting class experiences that would be easy to do in person. We are transitioning to an online campus…

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I was having a conversation with someone who has left teaching for the moment. “I am not ready to do it again,” she tells me, “I am not ready to teach undergraduates again.” This quote might strike home with many who are preparing to return to the classroom in January. The only good response to…

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What does it mean to have a good class? I’m spending a lot of time – too much – staring at a Google document that has a bunch of dates and blank space.  Whatever I choose to put there is going to be heavily influential in how this semester’s students wind up feeling and thinking…

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Had a great time at the Book Culture 20% off sale last weekend. It’s got to be my favorite New York City bookstore, but I haven’t done a YouTube video on it yet. I really only do the bookstore videos when I’m travelling but I should do my home city as well. There are a…

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What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate? I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume…

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Last week I had the fantastic opportunity of sitting down with Tyler Poteet from Power of Public Speaking to record an episode for their podcast. In this interview I talk about my classroom practices and my approach to public speaking. I think it’s probably one of the clearest articulations I have of the importance of…

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Most dangerous teaching practices come from the assumption that the teacher is the source of knowledge in the class. This seems like a no-brainer. Obviously, the teacher is there because the teacher knows the subject. But many processes and norms about teaching create some tension with this assumption. First, most classroom teachers at the secondary…

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I’m not sure how many of these there are going to be, but the more I think about it there are probably a lot of assumptions we make as teachers that are dangerous not only to the class you have right now, but to peoples’ conception of teaching and learning in the meta. Every class…

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Teaching online has me thinking about the assumptions we make about the classroom and what happens there. I still have a classroom, but it is distributed. The classroom and the class is a state of mind that can be constituted through various means. My students invoke themselves as part of the class when they are…

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It is supposed to feel like 110 degrees outside today so I’m staying pretty mellow inside. Cleaning out some of my bookshelves was easier than I thought it would be. Still in process. Set up a new facebook page for my side business of speech teaching, we’ll see if it gets any attention. Also Above…

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