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 ...

WebCampus Discussions are a great way to foster learning and promote engagement and community in classes taught in all modalities. This page discusses why to use online discussions, and shares some ...

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 ...

Academic instructors, hired for their content expertise, are rarely trained in skills like classroom facilitation or community-building. But successful collaborative learning requires a degree 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 ...

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 ...

As an undergraduate, I took a seminar dedicated entirely to Ulysses by James Joyce. Joyce’s modernist novel is mystifying, so question marks hung on the ends of students’ contributions. As we ...