Co-create your own adventure — our presentation at MNT 2025
Kjersti Daae and myself have a poster at MNT today (kindly presented by Anna-Marie Strehl). Below is the text we wrote for the conference proceedings.
Category: literature
“It is our responsibility as educators not only to impart knowledge but also to inspire and support our students to make a difference. For if we don’t do it, who will?” Bolander Laksov (2025)
Already a month ago, my colleague and current guest professor in our group, Klara Bolander Laksov, published the column “Democracy – An Educational Mission for Higher Education” in “universitetsläraren“, the magazine…
Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024), Part III
In preparation of the next meeting of our book club, here is my summary of Part III of Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School by Venet (2024) (summary…
Currently reading “the Climate Change Playbook” by Meadows et al. (2016)
In a recent Transformation Thursday (the monthly networking opportunity that Terese and I have started, where we sit in one of the university canteens over lunch and invite teachers wanting…
Currently reading: Connaught (2024) “Reframing the impostor phenomenon for Black college students”
I have been critical of the “impostor syndrome” — that everybody seems to be talking about everywhere these days! — for a while because it puts the responsibility of dealing…
Currently reading: “Why do teachers matter?” by López-Martín et al. (2023)
The study I am summarising here is a meta-analysis of 40 studies on how teacher characteristics influence secondary-school students, and they find that teacher characteristics and competencies explain 9% of…
Currently reading about SDGs, education for wonder, and academic activism
As many other places in the world, my university works with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework, and for many researchers and teachers pointing to one or…
Currently reading Cortinhas (2025) on “Does nudging higher education students improve attendance and does it matter?”
Samuelsson et al. (2025) recently investigated students’ reasons for absence, and it turns out that at least our first-year students at LTH are very strategic about attendance vs learning in…
Reflections on the workshop “Pedagogy of Hope” by Diana Holmqvist
On Friday, I participated in a workshop on the “pedagogy of hope”, that Diana Holmqvist from Linköping University ran. Since she is one of the two authors of my current…
Reading on cheating and grading (Henslee et al., 2025; and Swanson et al., 2025)
I have such a backlog of wave watching pics that I really need to blog more… Two articles today, the first one on “Students’ Perceptions of Self and Peers Predict…
Currently reading McBrady (2025) on “Don’t Set Goals, Set Systems: Using Decoding the Disciplines and Students as Partners to Strengthen a History Department and its Teacher Candidates”
I decided to read this article because I am thinking about both “decoding the disciplines” and “students as partners” in different contexts, and I wanted to see how they come…
“Should teachers worry that giving students gold stars or stickers for completing writing assignments decreases their motivation?” Currently reading Bardach & Murayama (2025) on “The role of rewards in motivation”
Bardach & Murayama (2025) discuss the conflicting results of studies on motivation, where rewards are found to both increase and decrease motivation, depending on the study. They point out that…
Currently reading Orr (1991) on “what is education for?”
In response to my post summarising Biesta’s purpose of education, my friend Terese sent me a speech David Orr gave in 1990 with a very similar vibe. Even though the…
Currently reading Månefjord et al. (2025) on “Mind the Gender Gap: Implicit bias in STEM education”
Beautiful day to read about the gender gap at LTH! Or at least about the implicit biases found in the environment I work in every day, and where I try…
Currently reading: Ellis et al. (2014) on “Systematic reflection: Implications for learning from failures and successes”
Since I referred to it in the post I just published, here is a quick summary of Ellis et al. (2014) on “Systematic reflection: Implications for learning from failures and…
One of my favourite podcasts discussing the book “Cultivating critical teaching behaviors” by Barbeau & Happel (2023)
On a recent walk (and dip, see featured image!), I listened to one of my all-time favourite podcasts, The Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, where host Bonni Stachowiak discussed with…
Currently reading: “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” Hund (2023)
I found the book “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” by Hund (2023) in something I read recently, and somehow the title spoke to me. Despite…
Reading about assessment for inclusion and distinctiveness
I have had the pdf of the article ‘There was very little room for me to be me’: the lived tensions between assessment standardisation and student diversity” by Nieminen et…
Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024), Part II
In preparation of the next meeting of our book club, here is my summary of Part II of Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School by Venet (2024)…
What does the availability of GenAI do to trust between students and teachers? Currently reading Luo (2024)
Cheating is not a new phenomenon by any means, but with the raise of GenAI, it seems to be easier than ever, and teachers seem to be more suspicious than…
Currently reading Biesta (2009): “Good education in an age of measurement: On the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education”
What is the purpose of education? In the midst of preparing classes, giving classes, reading student work, giving feedback, assessing, we don’t often enough stop and think about why we…
Smile! And the world smiles back. Or something like that. Currently reading Beaudry et al. (2024)
A good relationship between teachers and students helps students learn better, but it is very unclear what exactly makes a good relationship. Is it trust as we recently investigated, or…
Quick summary on reading about how to write a role play for learning
One way to help students engage with what they value and believe themselves, and how values and beliefs and interests influence what positions people take, might be setting up a…
Currently reading: Tai et al. (2022) on “Assessment for inclusion: rethinking contemporary strategies in assessment design”
I just read this really interesting and important article about “assessment for inclusion, which seeks to ensure diverse students are not disadvantaged through assessment practices” by Tai et al. (2022).…
The jigsaw method (with editable files to organise it)
The “jigsaw method” is used for cooperative learning (and Anja Møgelvang explains here what that is). In a nutshell, let’s say we have a group of 25 students. We can…
Currently reading: “Emerging learning environments in engineering education” by Hadgraft & Kolmos (2020)
In “Emerging learning environments in engineering education” by Hadgraft & Kolmos (2020), which my colleague recommended I read, the authors state that “engineering institutions might be falling behind in re-thinking…
“The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating” by Ellis & Murdoch (2024)
When Rachel writes she agrees that an article is brilliant and important and a ’must read’ for anyone in higher ed involved in/concerned about academic integrity and assessment security, guess…
Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024)
I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a…
Published! Kordts et al. (2025) “TAP: Teaching Analysis Poll for student feedback”
“Teaching Analysis Polls” are a very useful method to get formative, constructive feedback from a whole class. An external facilitator comes in and structures an approximately 30 minute long discussion…
Why don’t students attend classes? A study by Samuelsson et al. (2025)
In many studies, student attendance of scheduled teaching activities has been found to correlate with student success. However, attendance pattern got majorly disrupted with the Covid-19 pandemic, and seem to…
Christensen & Weissmann (2025) on using audio diaries for reflection on early career academic teacher identities
In the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course that I teach twice each year, we include a compulsory “individual reflection”, where participants pick an experience they have had in a…
Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: “Where could Higher Education go? A hopeful perspective”
New super interesting guest post by Kirsty Dunnett, on playful higher education!
Published! “STEM Students Prefer Assessment Practices Known to Reduce the Impact of Test Anxiety” by Costello et al. (2025)
Back in 2022, I worked on a really cool study on belonging and test anxiety together with the awesome colleagues you see in the featured image: aside from me taking…
Reading Pleasants et al. (2023, 2024) on technoskepticism
Our experience with how students argue in the Climate Fresk serious game is that they often jump to technical solutions to climate change right away and are unwilling to even…
“An active academia for peace and sustainability” Hattle et al. (2025), and about constructive hope and doubt (Marlon et al., 2019)
After following the journey of my voting letter in the tracking app for more than a week and seeing that it did not make it to Sunday’s election on time,…
“Generous scholarship” after Martinovic et al. (2022) and Craig (2020) — compliment and aspiration
“Generous scholarship is an intentional, collegial approach to scholarship that helps to mitigate the sense of isolation and depletion of energy often associated with managerial, production-oriented academic contexts” (Martinovic et…
Currently reading “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025)
The title “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025) sounded provocative enough that it went directly to the top of my reading…
Lund University “HT samtal” podcast on “teaching sensitive topics”
I finally managed to listen to Lund University’s “HT samtal” podcast episode on “Teaching sensitive topics“, where Dean Sara Håkansson talks with four teachers from the Humanities & Theology faculty…
Reading “Distributed leadership and peer review: a MOOC exemplar” by Bosanquet & Harvey (2005), and checking out their MOOC
I have always liked online learning, and ever since my first MOOC experiences (with the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC on Coursera back in 2015, which set me on the…
“Teachers should be allowed to be learners”! Currently reading Lidgren et al. (2006)
What are the barriers to including sustainability into courses and curricula at Lund University? Lidgren, Rodhe and Huisingh (2006) start from the premise that universities have an important role to…
Reading about design principles for blended learning
I am in the brainstorming phase of a super cool project where we are planning to collaborate on; giving an academic development course in two countries simultaneously, teaching both online…
Currently reading To (2025) on “Feedback partnerships: strengthening students’ proactive recipience through co-creating dialogic feedback”
Today I present to you another artefact stemming from my new social media habits (browsing bluesky on the bus to work in the morning, usually finding at least one article…
Ice watching and thinking about reflections — in the water, and in Harvey et al. (2025)’s article
Climbing the steps out of the water after an ice dip lets me see the world from a different perspective. Instead of focussing on not slipping and on controlling my…
It is not up to us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it
I now finished reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice in School” (where I understood that “the process is the point“, and where then helpful tools like…
Currently reading “Generative AI for Academics” by Carrigan (2024)
The other day I read something (that I cannot find again) along the lines of “GenAI creates art for people who hate art, music for people who hate music, reading…
Currently reading: “Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching” by Lamb et al. (2025)
This morning on the bus, I came across the article “Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching” by Lamb et al. (2025). I previously wrote about dance as a metaphor for…
Students who say that they cannot be bothered to engage with a task are not necessarily the ones that end up “unsuccessful”
When Rachel sends me something, I read ;-) If students, in their second week at university, say that they “can’t be arsed” to do an in-class exercise — will they…
Kirsty Dunnett on Galløe (2023)’s “emotions differentiate opportunities”
My most loyal guest poster strikes again! Welcome Kirsty Dunnett, today writing about Galløe (2023)’s chapter on how emotions differentiate opportunities.
Currently reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School”
I’m continuing my reading of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” (online access for LU!). I first wrote about the first couple of pages here.…
Published! “Superficially plausible outputs from a Black Box: problematising GenAI tools for analysing qualitative SoTL data” Glessmer & Forsyth (2025)
We had spent the last month reading, coding, discussing, re-coding, discussing some more, re-coding, discussing even more, and then consensus coding free-text answers of 449 students, and submitted the manuscript.…
Currently reading and thinking about Sustainability Communication
Yesterday, I talked to someone about Sustainability Communication and what we should be teaching our students, and I was honestly expecting something like the Karpman Drama Triangle (see featured image)…
The process is the point.
I picked up my copy of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” this morning and I loved the book before I even started reading the…
Currently reading “Gender Differences in the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Higher Education: Characteristics and Consequences” by Møgelvang et al. (2024)
Who uses GenAI, what for, and why does it matter? That’s what Anja Møgelvang (who also does lots of other fascinating work, for example on cooperative learning) and colleagues explore…
Currently reading Narong (2024): “A system-based framework for engineering education as sustainable development”
After writing about “Teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability?” last night, writing about Engineering Education as Sustainable Development seems to be the logical next step. This is a summary of…
More reading about mattering and care in higher education, inspired by the work of Gravett, Kinchin and others
I really enjoyed reading the Gravett & Ajjavi (2022) article on “belonging as a situated practice”, especially since I see a connection with other thoughts I am having on place-based…
Currently reading: “The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done to Someone by Someone” by Hedvall & Ericsson (2024)
I recently discussed the problems with calling for “inclusion” with a participant in my course on, ironically, “the inclusive classroom”. But she told me about colleagues working on “nonclusion”, so…
Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: “Odd feedback at year’s end and some New Years’ learning: what will peer review in 2025 and beyond look like”
Welcome to a new guest post by my most loyal guest blogger, Kirsty Dunnett, on odd experiences with peer review and generative AI which, in combination, provoke a lot of…
Published! “Engineering students trust teachers who ask, listen, and respond” (Glessmer, Persson, Forsyth; 2024)
This article was probably the easiest and most fun to write in my whole career so far! Trust between students and teachers is a really engaging topic, so when Rachel…
Currently reading: “The Value of Openness in Open Science” by Santana (2024)
I really enjoyed reading the article “The Value of Openness in Open Science” by Santana (2024), which I accidentally stumbled across on bluesy (Connect with me there: @mirjamglessmer.bsky.social). Santana (2014)…
Reading up on the purpose, pros and cons of positionality statements
Reading up on more positionality statement discussions for ongoing work with Kirsty, which started from us drawing up our own positionality statements and discussing the differences [see hers and mine…
Different ways students are talking about Wicked Sustainability Problems (currently reading Lönngren, Ingerman, & Svanström; 2017)
When teaching for sustainability, we need to give students the chance to practice working with Wicked Problems, and we as teachers need to figure out where they are at in…
Currently reading: “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024)
This morning, I read the article “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and it really resonated with…
Using eco-guilt to motivate behaviour change seems not really supported by literature
Following up on what I wrote on Friday about how my colleague respond to her talking about sustainability issues with “don’t make me feel guilty”, I am exploring eco-guilt as…
Thinking about how to respond when people say “Don’t talk to me about sustainability, you make me feel guilty!”
Today one of my colleagues told me that a very common reaction she gets in her department is that people do not want to talk to her about sustainability because…
Striving for accountable spaces (instead of safe or brave ones)
Hearing promises of “safe spaces” is usually a quick way to get me very angry. Safe for whom? And safe from whom? Probably not safe for minorities from dominant discourses……
Currently reading Kezar (2005) on “Moving from I to We: Reorganizing for collaboration in higher education”
I have recently noticed over and over again that many teachers tell us that they would love to work more collaboratively, that they are craving community, that they would like…
Learning from history. Currently reading “Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change” (Macintyre, Tilbury, Wals; 2024)
Before I started browsing this book, my gut feeling was that while it would surely be educational to read, I really did not feel like a history lesson of the…
Academic developers are burning out (and finding coping strategies?)
“Paradoxically, it seems that although academic development centres to an increasing degree support academics in avoiding burnout, support structures to hinder burnout of academic developers are almost non-existent.” (Bolander Laksov…
The “returner problem” in academic development (currently reading: Bolander Laksov, 2024)
One problem of academic development is the “returner problem” — enthusiasm that participants might show during the workshops or other professional development opportunities we provide does often not result in…
Academic development as “collaborative knotworking” (currently reading Elmberger et al., 2020)
Today I came across the metaphor of “collaborative knotworking” for academic development. I think it is really helpful to think about this in the context of the “returning home problem”…
Employees on social media — whose voice do we hear? Reading two cool studies
Social media has become a bit of a dumpster fire on most channels that I have been using, but even so I have a hard time letting go. I like…
How do teachers describe what they mean by trust in a teaching context? Currently reading Sutherland et al. (2024)
My own work on what makes students trust teachers was inspired by an interview that I did with Rachel Forsyth (in the botanical garden shown in the featured image, and…
Approaching wicked problem management in higher education (Currently reading: Hamshire, Barrett and Forsyth; 2024)
Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the…
Structuring local, inquiry-based field work (Praskievicz, 2022)
I am catching up on my reading for the iEarth Journal Club! This month is very much in line with what my recent thinking on place-based learning, active lunch breaks to…
Reading up on how climate protests work
Inspired by Robert’s Climate Activism 101 course, I have become more and more interested in reading about non-violent protests and understanding how they work.
Exploring PBL, reflection, student identity, and sustainability in Ginie Servant-Miklos’ work
I am currently in the early stages of co-developing a course, most likely project-based, on sustainability for engineering students. I have written a lot about how I am trying to…
“Why students trust teachers, and what we can do to increase their trust”. Keynote at the Lund University conference on inclusive teaching, with Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the “Inclusive Lund University” conference, together with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson. We talked about our recent study…
Thinking about Storytelling in Teaching for Sustainability
I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching. And the way he introduces the…
Currently reading & thinking about “The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003)
I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching, and he asked me to read…
Currently reading: “The Ideal Outcome of Education for Sustainability: Transformative Sustainability Learning” (Michel et al., 2020)
I have written about transformative experiences (wave watching! When you suddenly see the world with new eyes) and transformative learning (with my favourite head-hands-heart model) before, but here comes the…
Currently reading “F2F, zoom, or asynchronous learning? Higher education students’ preferences and perceived benefits and pitfalls” (Shlomo & Rosenberg-Kima, 2024)
We often discuss teaching and learning formats, and now there is a nice study that compares face-to-face, synchronous online, and asynchronous online in the same introductory physics course: Both stated…
Unsurprising but important research: there is a sequential bias based on order in which work is presented and then graded in learning management systems (after Wang et al., 2024)
My awesome colleague Rachel Forsyth (of our amazing “trust” paper) sent me a message saying “unsurprising but important research” and then a link to Wang et al. (2024), and that…
Second meeting of the “Climate Activism 101” course, and more reading
The more I am reading about activism, the more I become aware of how my thinking is constrained by the images that I have accepted as ways to simplify a…
Attempting to Assess Key Competencies in Sustainability
In this post, I am bringing together a bunch of thoughts and literature, and try to provide an idea of how to assess key competencies in sustainability. Wish me luck!…
Guest post by Mattias Lundmark on Self-Determination Theory (Vansteenkiste, Lens & Deci; 2006)!
“Motivation is left, right and centre in learning. Self Determination Theory’s (SDT) is one of the main theories of motivation, and its two founders, Ryan and Deci, are number 6…
Currently reading: “Sustainable assessment revisited” (Boud & Soler, 2016)
“Sustainable assessment” is about making assessment useful to learning beyond the frame of the course it is related to, not just in terms of retaining the learnt information and skills…
Thinking about “Agency, context and change in academic development” (Land, 2001)
I recently rediscovered the article by Land (2001) on how different orientations to academic development can be put into relation to each other. And I find it so helpful to…
Thinking about Maria Weurlander’s seminar on “When learning becomes difficult: Emotional challenges in education”
Yesterday I was one of those annoying people on their laptop during a seminar, taking notes during Maria Weurlander’s presentation on “When learning becomes difficult: Emotional challenges in education”, and…
Reading in preparation of the next meeting of “Climate Activism 101”
We’ve been given quite a substantial reading/watching list for the “Climate Activism 101” course, so let’s start with two things that aren’t actually on it, but maybe should be, before…
Podcast recommendations: Squiggly careers (and, as always, Academic Imperfectionist)
Maybe this blog (which, btw, celebrated its 11th anniversary this Wednesday!) is the most visible symptom of the enmeshment of my life and work, how I sometimes feel like I…
UNECE “Competences for educators in education for sustainable development”
After having thought a lot about what we need to teach our students in terms of sustainability competencies, what is it that teachers actually need to know, be able do,…
Thoughts on belonging, not-belonging, and teacher identity
The book Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, edited by Howson & Kingsbury (2024) has been opened on my desktop literally since the day it was published. And in…
Thoughts on a webinar on “Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP): Working with Sustainable and Inner Development Goals” by Karen Costa
Since on one of her first slides (and here is a link to the slides that contains links to all resources mentioned below, too) last night, Karen Costa invited participants…
Thinking about assessing sustainability competencies
Current goal: Figuring out how to do assessment of sustainability competencies for a pass/fail course (where the fail option is an actual option*).
Podcast recommendation: The Happiness Lab on pseudo-productivity and how we should work instead
My friend Frauke recommended I listen to the episode “Why don’t we have a 15-hour work week” of The Happiness Lab podcast, and I recommend you do, too! Here are…
Inner development and mindfulness at university (reading Libertson, 2023)
As I wrote recently when discussing frameworks for sustainability competencies, intrapersonal competencies have only recently been added as integral parts to the common frameworks. Today, I am summarising an article…
Sustainability competences, what they mean and when we need them (loosely after Wiek, Redman, and colleagues)
I like using the Redman & Wiek (2021) framework for sustainability competencies that shows sustainability competencies relating to each other as well as to disciplinary content and generic competencies. But…
Currently reading “Implementing competence orientation: Towards constructively aligned education for sustainable development in university-level teaching-and-learning” (Wilhelm et al., 2019)
Over the summer, I have read a lot about sustainability competencies. But I still find it really difficult to implement them into curricula (or build curricula around them from scratch),…
Browsing the “you have a part to play” toolkit for higher education for sustainability (Meerkerk, de Mul & Broekhaus; 2024)
I’m currently preparing for several consulting projects where I’ll be supporting groups of teachers with developing their teaching to include a focus on sustainability competencies, so I am looking through…
Reading about team-based faculty development (Bolander Laksov et al., 2022)
Bolander Laksov et al. (2022) designed a program “to support teams of clinical teachers to build capacity to lead educational change based on educational research in their clinical environments” to…
Helping students connect disciplinary concepts with the real world is helping them learn
I’ve claimed that for years (for example with wave watching, with active lunch breaks, with tweeting about course content), but now I read the current iEarth Journal Club article that…
Listening to podcasts on DEI, conspiracy theories, and micro motivation
I’m back to listening to podcasts! I don’t know why it goes in such waves, but here we go with some recommendations from what I listened to in the last…
Summary part 2&3 of “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” (Vare, Lausselet, Rieckmann, 2022)
I have previously summarised the first part of the book “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” by Vare, Lausselet, & Rieckmann (2022), and here are some take-aways from…
Recently published: “Supporting sensemaking by introducing a connecting thread throughout a course” (Daae, Semper, Glessmer; 2024)
Rotating fluid dynamics are super cool on the one hand (just look at my collection of DIYnamics rotating experiments, or our time on the 13m-diameter-tank-on-a-merry-go-round in Grenoble), but also super…
Recently published: “Adapting a Teaching Method to Fit Purpose and Context” (Glessmer, Bovill & Daae; 2024)
New article published! “Adapting a Teaching Method to Fit Purpose and Context” (Glessmer, Bovill & Daae; 2024), based on this blogpost, but a little more thought through and polished with…
Currently reading about “botshit”, and how to avoid it (Hannigan, McCarthy, Spicer; 2024)
When I recently summarized an article that claimed that Large Language Models (LLM) are “bullshit”, I got a lot of strong reactions offline and online about that term, and a…
According to Hicks et al. (2004), “ChatGPT is bullshit”. And they make good arguments for it, too!
I have written about playing with GAI for certain purposes, most recently to “discuss” the development of a workshop when I had no person to discuss it with. But this…
Summary part 1 of “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” (Vare, Lausselet, Rieckmann, 2022)
Continuing my mission of “I am reading it so you don’t have to” on a new book: Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives by Vare, Lausselet, & Rieckmann…
Currently reading “Academic identities and teaching wicked problems: how to ‘shoot a fog’ in a complex landscape” (McCune et al., 2024)
Teaching about sustainability is teaching about a (or many) wicked problem(s), and that is a challenge for teachers for many reasons. We need to, for example, teach how to work…
In a nutshell: “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
I really really really recommend that you read this book, but if you are short on time, check out my summary posts (part I, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB) or the…
Thinking about sustainable futures, inspired by a recorded lecture by Dougald Hine
Last night I watched a lecture by Dougald Hine. It is part of an online course on Higher Education Didactics for Sustainability that I did not take myself, but that…
It is not necessary to convince teachers of active learning any more, it is now about improving the quality! (Dancy et al., 2024)
I haven’t read a lot of physics education research recently, but this article on how “Physics instructors’ knowledge and use of active learning has increased over the last decade but…
On all the levels of decision making when sharing responsibility for learning (after Heron, 1992)
I have been thinking a lot about how we want to share responsibility when co-creating, responsibility for what, and sharing with whom, and then Cathy recommended the Heron (1992) chapter…
Database of Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion
This blogpost is mostly a note to myself so that I don’t have to search for the database of methods for non-violent protest and persuasion next time I need it!…
Reading about building and rebuilding trust in higher education (Lewicka, 2022)
Lewicka (2022) investigates how trust in higher education institutions is build (and rebuilt). This is a much broader question than the one that we have investigated, but I recognize many…
Reading more about academics and social media
Clearly I am not completely done with Social Media yet, so much to read, so much to think about…
Currently reading about authenticity in assessment (Ajjawi et al., 2024)
https://imoox.at/mooc/course/view.php?id=969§ion=4Time for another iEarth Journal Club article summary, this time about authenticity in assessment!
Social Media is dead, long live Social Media! Currently reading about a Social Media Entry Model for teachers (Machado et al., 2024)
Ok, so I just published two blog post, last weekend and today, on how I have lost interest in social media. And then I came across an article on a…
Currently reading “Social media for academics” by Carrigan (2020)
I’ve been teaching about social media for academics in one way or another for a long time. I have recommended at least two books to read (links to my blogposts…
Thinking about how ““first” is just another word for colonialism”
Recently, I have read a bit about how claiming to be the first to do/research/find/describe/discover/explain is really a form of colonialism, not the proof of excellence we commonly think it…
Mapping the requirements of the Swedish Higher Education Ordinance (1993) and Key Sustainability Competencies (Redman & Wiek, 2021)
This is just a quick and dirty mapping, but even though details can certainly be discussed, I think that there is nevertheless a striking overlap between what the Swedish law…
Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: “Thinking about my positionality as a teacher and researcher in physics education and academic development”
I thought a lot, and wrote (e.g. here), about my positionality in relation to my work recently, inspired by conversations with, and nudging by, Kirsty. Below, I am posting her response…
Currently reading about how to successfully organize team work in student groups
Quick summary of this month’s iEarth Journal Club article: Clinton & Smith (2009) focus on how to “make” students take on responsibility in team work through team contracts and peer…
Currently Reading “Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge” (Lowe, 2023)
Students can engage in higher education in different ways: behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or in any combination of those. Traditionally, this is seen as engagement with the curriculum inside the classroom,…
Currently reading about wicked problems in teaching for sustainability
As part of my “Teaching for Sustainability” course, participants find & summarize articles that are relevant for developing their own teaching. From their summaries, the two articles below on using…
Summarizing more literature on trust between students and teachers
The assumption that teacher-student relationships are important has been around for a long time and is probably uncontested. But when it comes to describing what exactly makes a good relationship,…
“The construction of meaning through vital engagement” (Nakamura & Csikzentmihalyi, 2003)
My awesome colleague and critical friend Peter sent me an article on “vital engagement”, which he has been talking about for a while and which I can very much relate…
Mindfulness in teaching (Brendel & Cornett-Murtada, 2019)
Recently I was very provoked by a colleague’s comment about how mindfulness practices lead to people’s focus being so inward that they will only strive to optimize their own lives…
Connections are everything! (Currently reading: Felten et al., 2023)
Just a quick post to recommend a book: “Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education” by Felten et al. (2023), which is available as a free e-book, so…
Planning a seminar on relationships in the classroom
In April, I will be teaching one afternoon in a course on “developing and leading courses at LTH”, on what we traditionally called “belonging”. Here are my thoughts so far.…
Students trust teachers who ask, listen, and respond (says my work with Peter Persson and Rachel Forsyth)
In my series of things-I-want-to-say-in-an-upcoming-workshop-but-suspect-I-might-skip-to-make-time-for-participants’-topics, here one slide about a recent study I did with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson when we got the chance to ask a…
STEM students’ sense of belonging and test anxiety in in Bergen (quick summary of work with Emily M. Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Robin Costello, Sarah Hammarlund, & Madeline Kate Kiani)
In my series of things-I-want-to-say-in-an-upcoming-workshop-but-suspect-I-might-skip-to-make-time-for-participants’-topics, here is a quick summary of work I did with Emily M. Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Robin Costello, Sarah Hammarlund, & Madeline Kate Kiani on STEM…
Intervening when witnessing microaggressions (my backup plan in case I don’t have time for this slide in an upcoming seminar)
I am planning a seminar on relationships in the classroom, and I have way too many things to say on that in general, AND want it to be driven by…
Recap of the first meeting of my new course “Teaching for Sustainability”
Yesterday was the first meeting of this spring’s installment of my “teaching for sustainability” course and it is so inspiring and energizing to meet so many motivated and engaged teachers!…
Operationalising and assessing sustainability competencies (some ideas from Wiek et al. (2016) and Redman et al. (2020))
We put a lot of effort into teaching for sustainability, but whether or not we are actually successful in doing so remains unclear until we figure out a way to…
Reflecting on my Scope of Practice (Inspired by Karen Costa’s interview on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast)
In one of my favorite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, I came across and interview with Karen Costa (and I wrote about another interview with her on another one of…
How politely should we talk to GAI in order to get the best results? Currently reading Yin et al. (2024)
Thanks to my awesome colleague Rachel and her Teams team I see so many interesting articles on GAI these days! For example the one by Yin et al. (2024) on…
Academic development as horizontal learning
There are different ways to approach academic development: courses are very common with different lengths and amounts of collaboration built in, as loose collection of seminars or with progression over…
“Liberating structures: Engaging everyone to build a good life together” (Lipmanowicz et al., 2015) — go read it and try them!
My friend Sigrid does short interviews with trainers and facilitators on her company Memogic‘s youtube channel, and I watched the interview with Inna Fischer (in German) yesterday. Inna’s energy was…
Thinking about my positionality as a teacher and researcher in academic development
Kirsty “gave me the task” to (that sounds harsher than it was — she pointed me to a super interesting article and we agreed to both) do a concept map…
Currently reading Högfeldt et al. (2023): “Leadership, support and organisation for academics’ participation in engineering education change for sustainable development”
Implementing education for sustainability throughout an institution is a huge challenge, so I am currently reading up on what we might be able to learn from other places. Högfeldt et…
Reading about a sense of belonging, and how it is more complicated than we might think
Belonging is a tricky concept and there is no consensus on how to measure it. And belonging can be in the university environment, in a course, in a discipline, with…
Recommended reading: “Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity” (Tanner, 2013)
Teaching for sustainability is about so much more than teaching the content and skills described in the SDGs, or even the cross-cutting sustainability competencies. Today, I talked with teachers who…
Currently reading Part III of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching…
Currently reading Part III of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching…
“It feels like having a smart friend which we ask anything and it can answer”: Currently reading: “Exploring Students’ Perceptions of ChatGPT: Thematic Analysis and Follow-Up Survey” (Shoufan, 2023)
I’m currently thinking a lot, and talking with a lot of students, about what builds trust between students and teachers: Mostly that teachers ask questions, listen, and respond. But then…
Thinking about student attendance. Podcast recommendation: “Talking Learning and Teaching” with Tom Lowe
Now that we are back to (the new?) normal after the pandemic, it seems that something has changed regarding how student physically attend teaching. Why is that? That’s what Kevin…
Currently reading Part II of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part of the summary of part II, here comes the…
Currently reading Part II of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, here comes PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches
Currently reading Part I of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
I am teaching the course “teaching sustainability” again in March, and while my course has a very applied focus on the questions teachers bring themselves into it, I have been…
Student evaluations of teaching as a “technology of power” (reading Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Freeman, 2020)
I just read this super interesting article about student evaluations of teaching as a “technology of power” that acts to prevent any change of the system from the status quo,…
How academic developers think about relationships between teachers (a lot of Roxå & Mårtensson papers, plus some others)
Our work as academic developers at CEE is based on how we think that relationships between teachers work, and using that to influence their conversations in a way that improves…
Trust that teachers have in academic development (Little & Green (2002) and others)
Now that my working assumption is that trust is essential for student learning, what about trust that our “students”, i.e. the participants in our academic development workshops, have in us?…
Currently reading: “Teachers interacting with students: an important (and potentially overlooked) domain for academic development during times of impact” (Roxå & Marquis, 2019)
I’m currently talking about trust between students and teachers at every opportunity I get, and recently Torgny pointed me to an article that he wrote a while back that I…
Kolb (1984), Olsson & Roxå (2013), and McAlpine & Weston (2000): Learning cycles and how closely do you stick to your planned teaching?
Experiential learning cycles are everywhere in my work in academic development, so here is a brief overview over how they are used to describe and support teachers developing their teaching.
“Faculty matter: So why doesn’t everyone think so?” (reading Kezar & Maxey, 2014)
And one more post about teacher-student relationships: a summary of “Faculty matter: So why doesn’t everyone think so?” by Kezar & Maxey (2014).
Teacher-student relationships (Hagenauer et al., 2014 & 2023)
You might have noticed that I am exploring different concepts of what makes a good teacher-student relationship recently: belonging, caring, and most recently, trust. Why am I not just picking…
(An attempt of) setting priorities in a team to avoid burnout
For a couple of months now I have been skating dangerously close to where workload becomes unhealthy, but I recently had a really good experience planning out work (i.e. generating…
Throwback to the pandemic: Teaching, cognitive and social presence (Rapanta et al., 2020), and zoom fatigue (Bailenson, 2021)
When I was teaching the emergency “how to teach online” courses online during the pandemic, I used to refer to an article by Rapanta et al. (2020) a lot, where…
Revisiting the Hendriks et al. (2016) trust model
After having read about “trust moves” that teachers report making (Felten et al., 2023), and currently working on figuring out what makes students trust their teachers (Persson et al., 2023), I…
Applying the Head-Hands-Heart framework to my “teaching sustainability” course
As we are getting ready to officially launch our new blog on “teaching about sustainability”, I am revisiting posts on this blog and rewriting them for the different outlet. And…
Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education (Currently reading Cumming & Rose, 2022)
I have written about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) before, and from those posts it is clear that I did struggle with the concept quite a bit before I got the…
Currently reading about how appealing to fear is effective in positively influencing behavior, and hardly ever backfires (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). Who would have thought?
Fear can lead to fight, flight, or freeze responses — or so we often hear. So far, I was under the impression that fear was generally not a good emotion…
Currently reading about how to make instructional videos more effective (through instructor presence and embedded prompts)
How can we make learning from instructional videos more effective? Does it help to have the instructor visible so students feel more connected and are more motivated to follow? Can…
Our seminar today: “Serious Games in Teaching for Sustainability”
Here comes my informal summary of today’s seminar on “Serious Games in Teaching Sustainability”. A more formal summary will go through the official channels shortly (or that’s the plan… :-))
Currently reading: “Ten simple rules for successfully supporting first-generation/low-income (FLI) students in STEM” by Peña et al. (2022)
As a very privileged continuing-generation student, I did occasionally notice how it helped when, during my studies, people in key positions at the university recognised my last name, or when…
Currently investigating: “If I don’t trust my teachers, how can I learn then?” (with Peter Persson and Rachel Forsyth)
I am currently doing this super interesting research project on trust with my colleagues Peter Persson and Rachel Forsyth. Rachel and colleagues developed a model for “trust moves” that teachers employ,…
Tips for creating inclusive classrooms at LTH (based on an article to be presented at LTH’s pedagogical conference this December)
I have been part of running a course called “the inclusive classroom” this fall. I learned a lot of new things both from other instructors (for example Louise’s excellent “office”…
Currently reading about cooperative & collaborative learning (Oakley et al., 2004; Møgelvang, 2023; Wieman et al., 2014)
iEarth’s current journal club paper deals with collaborative exams as learning opportunities, and this fits perfectly with Anja Møgelvang’s recent article on cooperative learning, where we can find inspiration for…
Structuring fieldwork as a jigsaw to increase student responsibility in, and ownership of, their projects
I am a huge fan of Kjersti‘s excellent teaching, it is always so inspiring! She, together with Hans-Christian, developed a jigsaw method to structure preparation for a student cruise, the…
Prompt engineering and other stuff I never thought I would have to teach about
Last week, I thought a very intensive “Introduction to Teaching and Learning” course where we — like all other teachers everywhere — had to address that GAI has made many…
Finally published yesterday: “Student guides: supporting learning from laboratory experiments through across-course collaboration” by Daae et al. (2023)
A project near and dear to my heart is using the DIYnamics rotating tank experiments in across-course collaborations. “Older” students, who did experiments the previous year, are trained to then…
Today’s reading: “What Students Value in Their Teachers – An Analysis of Male and Female Student Nominations to a Teaching Award” by Wennerberg et al. (2023)
I’m not a big fan of student evaluations of teaching, since they’ve often been shown to be biased (see for example Heffernan (2021)), so when I saw the title of…
Currently reading: “The impact of grades on student motivation” (Chamberlin et al., 2023)
An argument that I encounter a lot is that student assignments need to be graded in order for students to put in any effort at all. But is that true?…
Currently reading: “Teaching with rubrics: the good, the bad, and the ugly” (Andrade, 2005)
Doing my reading for the monthly iEarth journal club… Thanks for suggesting yet another interesting article, Kirsty! This one is “Teaching with rubrics: the good, the bad, and the ugly” (Andrade,…
Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: The strength of evidence in (geosciences) education research: might a hierarchy do more harm than good?
Below, Kirsty is discussing how it can potentially discourage efforts to improve teaching and teachers when we focus on the strength of evidence too much, and don’t value the developmental…
Facilitating the Biodiversity Collage and reading more about serious games in teaching about sustainability
Last week I had the pleasure to work with “real” students (“real” in contrast to the teachers that I typically work with) and it gave me so much energy* to…
How to create an Activity Bingo for teaching purposes
We have recently shared our experiences with a Bingo game to nudge students to make the most out of fieldwork (Glessmer et al., 2023), and I have created Bingos for other…
How can we adapt a teaching method for our purposes? The “Doughnut rounds” example
One thing that often surprises me is how seriously many teachers take teaching methods. As in, there must be fixed times for each of the phases of think-pair-share. Or there…
Currently reading: “Geeky Pedagogy” by J. Neuhaus
The subtitle “A guide for intellectuals, introverts, and nerds who want to be effective teachers” really intrigued me, and below is a collection of thoughts on it.
Revisiting Universal Design for Learning
I have again been chewing on the “Universal Design for Learning” idea for the last couple of days. This was prompted by us agreeing that we want to let participants…
iEarth journal club on ‘Education as Relational Process’ by K. J. Gergen
For this week’s iEarth journal club, we are reading the chapter ‘Education as Relational Process’, from Kenneth J. Gergen’s book ‘An Invitation to Social Construction‘. My thoughts below.
Doing things together instead of alone: structures for Collective SoTL — a guest post by Kirsty Dunnett
Kirsty sent me this super interesting text with a vision of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) being a collective enterprise, rather than a mostly individual one. I love the…
Just three emails to improve student grades and retention? Yes, please!
Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, “tea for teaching“. The episode was on the role of faculty engagement, specifically showing students that…
Published now: “Activity bingo: Nudging students to make the most out of fieldwork”
Kjersti and I, together with Linda and Francesco, just published an article in Oceanography on the fieldwork bingo we developed for the student cruises earlier this year (and that came…
Currently reading: “Building Trust in the Classroom: A Conceptual Model for Teachers, Scholars, and Academic Developers in Higher Education.” by Felten et al. (2023)
Last summer, I sat in the botanical garden with Rachel Forsyth and had a super interesting conversation about the importance of trust between teachers and students, and what I do…
Derivatives and Concept Images — a guest post by Kirsty Dunnett
Another guest post by Kirsty Dunnett about the difficulty of applying skills from a maths course in the context of geoscience courses, and what can be done to make it…
Currently reading: “Five moves towards an ecological university” by Kinchin (2023)
How can we imagine future universities that are less market-driven and more socially just, focussed on community and sustainability? Possibly by using a different metaphor, that of ecology, according to…
Another serious game for teaching sustainability that I like: the Climate Fresk
As you’ve seen from my recent Biodiversity Collage posts, I have gotten into serious games as tools for teaching. Today, I am reading up on a different game, the Climate…
Currently reading: Lots of Robson et al. articles on gamification
I started reading an article on gamification by Robson et al. and then went down the rabbit hole of their other publications. But at least now I have thought about…
Currently reading “Games, motivation, and learning: A research and practice model” by Garris et al., 2002
Lots of reading on serious games as tools in sustainability teaching going on here at the moment…
Currently reading “Bicycle model on climate change education: Presenting and evaluating a model.” by Cantell et al., 2019
Came across this model, had to share! You know I love me a good visualization of a model, and I think this one is brilliant to help support thinking about…
Currently reading: “Beyond open book versus closed book: a taxonomy of restrictions in online examinations.” by Dawson, Nicola-Richmond, & Partridge (2023)
If we want to do a valid assessment of what a specific student can do, we need to know what information they had available when producing the artifact we are…
Kirsty Dunnett’s addition to my post on “A conceptual framework for the teaching and learning of generic graduate attributes” (Barrie, 2007)
Haha, I ended my post this morning with “…but at that point I lost interest”, and apparently that’s a great call to action! Kirsty Dunnett, faithful guest blogger on my…
Currently reading: “A conceptual framework for the teaching and learning of generic graduate attributes” (Barrie, 2007)
When my colleague sent this article to a student we are collaborating with the other day, I decided that it was about time that I read it, too. Last time…
Thinking about my role as academic developer as being a Handal-type “critical friend”
This week, I gave a presentation on “supporting teachers at LTH to teach about sustainability” to an EU project with partners from universities in lots of different countries, and in…
Currently reading: “Competencies for advancing transformations towards sustainability” (Redman & Wiek, 2021)
What competencies should we be teaching students so they will be best equipped to work towards a sustainable future? The (really useful, me thinks!) Redman & Wiek (2021) framework.
How to show students that they matter, inspired by episodes of two of my favourite podcasts
Yesterday I went on a lovely after-work walk with one of my favorite podcasts (check them out, all highly recommended!), and I want to mention two podcast episodes Iistened to recently,…
Currently reading “How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction” by Dancy & Hodari (2022)
This article has repeatedly been making waves in my circles over the last couple of months: “How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction” by Dancy &…
Reminding myself of “Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do” (Steele, 2011)
As I was gathering my favorite three books on learning and teaching to wave at the participants of our “introduction to teaching and learning” course today, I realized I never…
Teaching Kugel (1993)’s “how professors develop as teachers”.
Another article that I just re-read for my teaching next week is Kugel (1993)’s “how professors develop as teachers”. Kugel describes the development of teachers in 6 stages that are…
Teaching about “Personal theories of teaching” (Fox, 1983)
In preparation for next week’s course, I just read Fox (1983)’s “Personal theories of teaching” and decided that it’s worth some time and discussion. So here is what I am…
Currently reading: “Reach everyone, teach everyone: Universal design for learning in higher education” (Behling & Tobin, 2018)
“Reach everyone, teach everyone” — that title caught me right away, and I’m glad I ordered and read the book by Tobin & Behling (2018)! They manage to make Universal…
Currently reading: “Disarming Racial Microaggressions: Microintervention Strategies for Targets, White Allies, and Bystanders” (Sue et al., 2019)
I have another recommended reading for you! I found this really nice framework for disarming microaggressions, both targeted directly towards the perpetrator, but also institutional and societal macroaggressions, in Sue…
Recommended reading: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022) (Part 2)
I’m back to browsing the “menu” in my new favorite book, “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). If you haven’t…
Recommended reading: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022)
I found a new YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!-book: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). It is aimed at…
“Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework” Kirsty Dunnett summarizes De Ketele (2014)
Who are you travelling with? A guest post by Kirsty Dunnett. A summary and some thoughts on: Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework By J.-M. De Ketele…
Currently reading Darby & Lang (2019) “Small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes”. My summary (3/x)
This is the third part (part 1 here, part 2 here) of my notes on reading “small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes” by Darby & Lang (2019).…
Currently reading Darby & Lang (2019) “Small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes”. My summary (2/x)
This is the second part (part 1 here) of my notes on reading “small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes” by Darby & Lang (2019). Take it…
Currently reading Darby & Lang (2019) “Small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes”. My summary (1/x)
I absolutely loved reading the “small teaching” book by Lang (2021), so I was super excited to dig into the related “small teaching online — applying learning science in online…
“Doughnut Rounds” (after Fleiszer et al., 1997)
A great teaching method that engages students with literature, and that Cathy Bovill recently introduced me to, are “doughnut rounds”: Students (or workshop participants) are asked to read an article…
Preparing conference presentations on our DIYnamics experiments in across-course collaborative learning
In 2021, Kjersti and I gave a presentation at iSSOTL on our across-course collaboration project using rotating lab experiments. We’ve continued working with that, and Kjersti is presenting two posters…
“Mandatory coursework assignments can be, and should be, eliminated!” currently reading Haugan, Lysebo & Lauvas (2017)
The claim in this article’s title, “Mandatory coursework assignments can be, and should be, eliminated!”, is quite a strong one, and maybe not fully supported by the data presented here.…
“Råd og tips til deg som underviser” (Raaheim, 2013)
I love books with practical teaching tips, and this one on “advice and tips for you as a teacher” caught my eye when I was borrowing Kjersti’s desk in Bergen.…
“Conflict is not abuse” by Schulman (2016)
The title of this book, “Conflict is not Abuse. Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” (Schulman, 2016), caught my eye in the office library. It looked like…
“Confident Assessment in Higher Education”, by Rachel Forsyth (2023)
I am so lucky to work with so many inspiring colleagues here at Lund University, and today I read my awesome colleague Rachel Forsyth’s new book on “confident assessment in…
“The slow professor — Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy” by Berg & Seeber (2016)
I have been recommended the book “The slow professor” from many different directions. It brings the “slow movement” (of slow food, slow travel, etc) into academia. And since I am…
Wamsler et al. (2021)’s literature review on “Linking internal and external transformation for sustainability and climate action”, and “Inner Development Goals”
Especially when it comes to teaching about climate change or sustainability more generally, it seems unavoidable to really consider mental states. While the dominant discourse around climate change has been…
“Integrating learning and work: Problems and prospects”: Currently reading Ellström (2001)
Yesterday, I had a really inspiring chat with a colleague and they mentioned a model by Ellström (2001) that really helps think about how much freedom vs guidance we want…
“Transforming the lowest-performing students: an intervention that worked” — Deslauriers et al. (2012)
iEarth has started a journal club! And the first article to be read is about “Transforming the lowest-performing students: an intervention that worked”. My summary below :-)
Currently reading: Relationship-rich education (Felten & Lambert, 2020)
I read the book “Relationship-rich education. How human connections drive success in college” by Felten & Lambert (2020) almost a year ago and found it super inspiring, but also very…
Emotionally-responsive teaching
When I was recently thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability, I came across the term “emotionally-responsive teaching” that really spoke to me, even though I did not really know what…
More “head, hands, and heart” in sustainability education, this time by Öhman & Sund (2021)
Talking about sustainability teaching, one model that seems to resonate with many teachers I speak with is the “Head, hands, heart” model by Sipos et al. (2008). I came across basically…
Thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability
In communicating about climate change specifically, and other sustainability challenges, there is often the debate around how to kickstart people into action. Paint the doom-and-gloom (i.e. realistic) picture so people…
Breathing practice: Where freediving and academic development collide
I recently wrote a lot about the emotions that we experience when really thinking about sustainability and the challenges that we face when we take it seriously (e.g. here), and…
“Systems conveners in complex landscapes” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014)
If I had to pick one book that has influenced my current thinking about teaching and learning the most, I would pick Wenger’s 1998 “Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and…
From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it” (reflecting on Stein et al., 2022)
A lot of things are happening around teaching sustainability at LU right now! As I am planning the second iteration of my “teaching sustainability” course, I am reading more about…
Reading Gin et al. (2021) on “how syllabi can serve as communication tools for creating inclusive classrooms”
This is mostly a “note to self”: Found a really interesting article on “how syllabi can serve as communication tools for creating inclusive classrooms” by Gun et al. (2021). A…
Currently reading: “Using self-explanations in the laboratory to connect theory and practice: The decision/explanation/observation/inference writing method” by Van Duzor (2016)
How can we scaffold laboratories in a way that doesn’t micromanage the students, keeps the task interesting, and helps the students to make sense of what they are doing and…
Four misunderstandings about sustainability (after Block & Paredis, 2019)
One thing I find irritating in many conversations around how to teach about sustainability is that they tend to get hung up on what “sustainability” actually means. So I got…
Fostering student sense of belonging in a large online class (after Lim, Atif, Farmer; 2022)
When we talk about fostering student sense of belonging, it is easiest to think about in-person interactions. However, a lot of our teaching these days is online, and in high-enrolment…
Reading about connections between theory and practice in teaching, metaphors for learning, and academically-supportive friendships
We recently ran a round-table discussion on “How to teach students who are not “mini-me”s (and don’t want to be)” at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference last year,…
Currently reading Cohen, Steele & Ross (1999) “The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide”
It seems to be common knowledge in my network that effective teachers articulate both high standards and their belief that students can meet those standards. Looking for sources for this…
Teaching sustainability: Reading about how to turn frustration into action
One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading!
Identity and emergency intervention (Currently reading: Levine et al., 2005)
The German NGO “Streitgut” recently posted a youtube video with a reference to an article on how activating different identities influences willingness to help, that I then had to check…
Currently reading: The impact of content co-creation on academic achievement (Doyle et al., 2021)
One part of co-creation — letting students create learning content for each other — has always been fascinating to me. The idea is that in order to create meaningful materials…
Currently reading Janke et al. (2017) on social identification with academia
After all the thinking about belonging I’ve done recently, I came across the article by Janke et al. (2017) today that measures “social identification with academia” as Venn-diagram with varying…
Currently reading Flett et al. (2022) on “anti-mattering”
As we are continuing working on our “sense of belonging” project at UiB (read more about my thoughts on students’ sense of belonging and what we can do about it here;…
Currently reading: “Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among university students. (Vandaele & Stålhammar, 2022)
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to many people that are in one way or other involved in teaching about sustainability at high school or university level. One…
Currently reading: Inspiring Action, Efficacy, and Connection: Weaving Sustainability into Environmental Science Curriculum through a Connected Learning Model (Bertossi & Halliwell, 2020)
Yesterday, in our “collegial project course: teaching sustainability”, I showed two models of how one might approach thinking about teaching sustainability, and here is another one that I quite like,…
Currently reading: “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006)
Somehow a print of the “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) article ended up on my desk. I don’t…
Currently reading: JUTLP special issue on belonging in an anxious world (articles 1-7)
In response to my blog post about belonging, I was made aware of the current issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) on “Pedagogies of belonging in…
A red thread in my career: Being intentional about building community
Today is my blog’s 9th Birthday! How incredible is that? I’ve published 1,300 blog posts (this one is, in fact, exactly number 1,300!). Who would have thought that this would…
Students’ sense of belonging, and what we can do about it
Last week, Sarah Hammarlund (of “Context Matters: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Can Reduce Inequities in STEM” by Hammarlund et al., 2022) gave a presentation here at LTH as part of…
Creating a “time for telling” (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998)
As we are talking more and more about co-creation and all these cool things, I find it important to remember that sometimes, giving a lecture is still a really good…
Currently thinking about: Transformative sustainability learning
A lot of the work I am doing at LTH is related in one way or other to teaching (to teach) sustainability. Here are some notes on an article I…
Currently reading: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)
A lot of the work I am doing at LTH is related in one way or other to teaching (how to teach) sustainability, so here are my notes on an…
Current reading: “Syllabus Language, Teaching Style, and Instructor Self-Perception: Toward Congruence” by Richmann, Kurinec & Millsap (2020)
Yes!! People are actually responding to my “send me an article that is currently inspiring you!” request! In a comment to my blog post “Summaries of two more inspiring articles…
Currently reading: “Motivating personal growth by seeking discomfort” by Woolley & Fishbach (2022)
I really enjoyed reading the article “Motivating personal growth by seeking discomfort” by Woolley & Fishbach (2022). They investigate the discomfort, for example awkwardness, we often experience when engaging in…
Currently reading: “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” by Kirschner & van Merriënboer (2013)
In today’s edition of “what article are you currently inspired by?“: an article that my colleague Michael sent me. “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” by Kirschner &…
Currently reading: “Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning” by Lang (2021)
On the “tea for teaching” podcast episode on trauma-aware pedagogy that I wrote about here, the book by Lang (2021) on “Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning” was recommended.…
Summaries of two more inspiring articles recommended by my colleagues: On educational assessment (Hager & Butler, 1996) and on variables associated with achievement in higher ed (Schneider & Preckel, 2017)
Following the call to share inspiring articles, here are two more that I’m summarising below. See the three previous ones (on assessment (Wiliams, 2011), workload (D’Eon & Yasinian, 2021), and…
Summaries of three inspiring articles on assessment (Wiliams, 2011), workload (D’Eon & Yasinian, 2021), and quality (Harvey & Stensaker, 2008)
In my group of academic development colleagues at LTH, we just opened up an internal call for the one (or two, or three, or more) articles that are most influential…
Trauma-aware teaching: Listening to Karen Costa on the “tea for teaching” podcast
Today was the first time in half a year or so that I listened to a podcast (other than the Academic Imperfectionist, where I make sure to not miss an…
Eight criteria for authentic assessment; my takeaways from Ashford-Rowe, Herrington & Brown (2014)
“Authentic assessment” is a bit of a buzzword these days. Posing assessment tasks that resemble problems that students would encounter in the real world later on sounds like a great…
Dealing with collective tragedy as a teacher, according to my reading of Huston & DiPetro (2007)
When “collective tragedy”, for example terrorism, or natural catastrophes like hurricanes and floods, or pandemics, happens, it is difficult to decide whether, and how, to act as teacher. Should we acknowledge…
Microaggressions: How intent and impact don’t always go together.
I’ve recently started including the topic of microaggressions in my academic development workshops, and here is one reflection on the topic (including the super helpful sandals&boots-analogy by Presley Pizzo). I…
My notes from last week’s ICED22 conference
Starting out with a wave watching picture from my walk before the first day of the conference. When in Aarhus, I had to get in the 90 minute walk before…
Reducing bias and discrimination in teaching: an annotated, incomplete — WORK IN PROGRESS! — list of references
Already at the time of posting, I have added to my to-read list for an updated version of this post. Please let me know of any additional literature I should…
The Curious Construct of Active Learning: A guest post by K. Dunnett (UiO) on Lombardi et al. (2021)
‘Active Learning’ is frequently used in relation to university teaching, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects where expository lecturing is still a common means of instruction, especially…
Catching up on my reading of Trigwell and Prosser et al. (1996, 1999, 2000)
There is a whole body of “historical” research by Trigwell and Prosser and co-authors that I’ve successfully ignored until now, but that is being referenced in conversations around me so…
Effective learning techniques for students: Currently reading Dunlosky et al. (2013)
I want to give you a quick summary of the super useful article “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology” by Dunlosky et…
Article just published: Collaborative Sketching to Support Sensemaking: If You Can Sketch It, You Can Explain It
What a lovely Birthday gift (and seriously impressively quick turn-around times at TOS Oceanography!): Kjersti‘s & my article “Collaborative Sketching to Support Sensemaking: If You Can Sketch It, You Can Explain…
Using peer feedback to improve students’ writing (Currently reading Huisman et al., 2019)
I wrote about involving students in creating assessment criteria and quality definitions for their own learning on Thursday, and today I want to think a bit about involving students also in…
Co-creating rubrics? Currently reading Fraile et al. (2017)
I’ve been a fan of using rubrics — tables that contain assessment criteria and a scale of quality definitions for each — not just in a summative way to determine…
Teaching to improve research skills? Thinking about Feldon et al. (2011)
When graduate students teach, they acquire important research skills, like generating testable hypotheses or designing research, more than their peers who “only” do research, according to Feldon et al. (2011),…
Three ways to think about “students as partners”
As we get started with our project #CoCreatingGFI, we are talking to more and more people about our ideas for what we want to achieve within the project (for a…
Reinholz et al. (2021)’s eight most used theories of change and how they relate to each other in my head
I’ve been playing with this figure (inspired by the Reinholz et al. 2021 article) for a while now for the iEarth/BioCeed Leading Educational Change course, where we try to look…
Using student evaluations of teaching to actually improve teaching (based on Roxå et al., 2021)
There are a lot of problems with student evaluations of teaching, especially when they are used as a tool without reflecting on what they can and cannot be used for.…
Thinking about theories of change (based on Reinholz et al., 2021)
I’ve spent quite some time thinking about how to apply theories of change to changing learning and teaching culture (initially in the framework of the iEarth/BioCEED course on “leading educational…
Thinking about “Universal Design for Learning”
Something that has been on my mind a lot lately is how to make learning situations welcoming and accessible to all students. A very obvious response is to the “accessible”…
Currently reading: “Microaggressions: Intervening in three acts” by Thurber & DiAngelo (2018)
I’m currently thinking so much about how to make academia a more welcoming and accessible environment, and just read the article “Microaggressions: Intervening in three acts” by Thurber & DiAngelo,…
Thinking about decolonising the curriculum (inspired by Dessent et al., 2022)
[Edit 5.9.2022: I just read “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Tuck & Yang (2012) and I am very much using decolonization as a metaphor in the blog post below. That…
Reading about quality cultures in academia (Harvey & Stensaker, 2008)
With my new job as academic developer at Lund University, I’m reading even more about changing academic cultures than before (but don’t worry, I have a couple of wave watching…
Just published: Co-Creating Learning in Oceanography
Kjersti and I just had an article published: “Co-Creating Learning in Oceanography” (Glessmer & Daae, 2021)! In this article, we discuss ways in which to share responsibility for learning between…
Students as partners as a threshold concept for students and teachers?
One of my goals as a teacher is to change culture towards responsibility for student learning being shared equally between teachers and students. This is an idea that is met…
Kaur & Noman (2020): A study applying self-determination theory on Students as Partners
I love using self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) as a framework against which I check all teaching I develop. Is it even possible for students to feel competence, autonomy,…
Guest post by Kjersti Daae: Using voting cards to increase student activity and promote discussions and critical thinking
I got permission to publish Kjersti Daae‘s iEarth conversation on teaching (with Torgny Roxå and myself in April 2021) on my blog! Thanks, Kjersti :-) Here we go: I teach…
A review of change theory in STEM higher ed (Reinholz et al., 2021)
More reading for my “leading educational change” course run by iEarth and BioCEED! Today on how change theory has been used in STEM higher education over the last 25 years…
Communities of practice
Summarising my reading on “communities of practice”, and my views on how this framework might be useful for thinking about change in our context, for our iEarth/BioCEED-led course on “leading…
Quick summary of literature on the Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform
As preparation for our next meeting in iEarth & bioCEED’s course on “Leading Educational Change”, I am reading up on “Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform” (TCSR). The motivation to develop TCSR as…
Podcasts on learning and teaching, career development, and mental health in academia
Over the summer, I’ve really gotten into podcasts, mainly to get new perspectives and ideas on university teaching, and also on life in academia. Here are several that I listen…
8 steps to accelerate change in your organization (Kotter, 2018)
I’ve been thinking a lot about driving change recently (especially in the context of the “leading educational change” course by iEarth and BioCEED), and found the Kotter Inc. website on…
Vicarious experiences in learning
In a recent iEarth teaching conversation, we talked about enthusiasm, and about what mechanisms might be at play if having an enthusiastic teacher really leads to better learning. Torgny then…
Currently reading: “Leveraging Multiple Theories of Change to Promote Reform” (Kezar & Holcombe, 2019)
I am attending a course on “leading educational change”, run by two Norwegian centres for excellence in education, iEarth and BioCEED. The course brings together people working on educational change…
Learning together across courses — our iSSOTL presentation
Last week, Kjersti Daae and I gave a virtual presentation at the iSSOTL conference, and here is a short summary. We presented an ongoing teaching innovation project, funded by Olsen…
Reflections on the GeoLearning Forum 2021
On October 21. and 22., I attended the fourth iEarth GeoLearning Forum (GLF). The GLF is an opportunity for geoscience teachers and students from all over Norway to meet up and…
The story of Robert and Susan (Biggs, 1999)
I attended iEarth’s GeoLearning Forum today and yesterday, and had a lot of great conversations with amazing students from the four iEarth institutions: Universities of Bergen, Oslo, Tromsø, and UNIS.…
When flying turns out to not be essential for academia (after Jack & Glover, 2021)
Yesterday morning on Twitter, I saw this quote: “The sudden grounding of academics has demonstrated that air travel ‒ previously deemed a necessary part of a successful academic career and…
Enacting frames of reference in geoscience education? (After Rollinde, Decamp and Derniaux, 2021)
I just read a super interesting article by Rollinde, Decamp ad Derniaux (2021) on “Should frames of reference be enacted in astronomy instruction?”. Frames of reference are an important concept…
Co-creating learning and teaching (Bovill, 2020)
Maybe it was because of the contexts in which I encountered it, but I always perceived “co-creation” as an empty buzzword without any actionable substance to it. I have only…
Pick a role and write a lecture summary from that perspective. Does that sound motivating?
Kjersti and I have been talking about asking students to take turns and write summaries of lectures throughout the whole semester. We would then give feedback on them to make…
The learning styles myth (based on Pashler et al., 2008; Nancekivell et al., 2020)
One idea that I encounter a lot in higher education workshops is the idea of learning styles: that some people are “visual learners” that learn best by looking at visual…
Building gender equity in the academy (Laursen & Austin, 2020)
After being “invited” to do some service work because someone noticed “that there was nobody on the committee without a beard” (gee, thanks for making me feel like you appreciate…
Why it’s important to use students’ names, and how to make it easy: use name tents! (After Cooper et al., 2017)
One thing I really enjoy about teaching virtually is that it is really easy to address everybody by their names with confidence, since their names are always right there, right…
A tool to understand students’ previous experience and adapt your practical courses accordingly — by Kirsty Dunnett
Last week, I wrote about increasing inquiry in lab-based courses and mentioned that it was Kirsty who had inspired me to think about this in a new-to-me way. For several years,…
Increasing inquiry in lab courses (inspired by @ks_dnnt and Buck et al., 2008)
My new Twitter friend Kirsty, my old GFI-friend Kjersti and I have been discussing teaching in laboratories. Kirsty recommended an article (well, she did recommend many, but one that I’ve…
“Wonder questions” and geoscience misconceptions.
Recently, as part of the CHESS/iEarth Summer School, Kikki Kleiven lead a workshop on geoscience teaching. She gave a great overview over how to approach teaching and presented many engaging…
Why should students want engage in something that changes their identity as well as their view of themselves in relation to friends and family?
Another iEarth Teaching Conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå, summarized by Mirjam Glessmer “Transformative experiences” (Pugh et al., 2010) are those experiences that change the way a person looks at…
#WaveWatching as “transformative experience”? (Based on articles by Pugh et al. 2019, 2011, 2010)
I was reading an article on “active learning” by Lombardi et al. (2021), when the sentence “In undergraduate geoscience, Pugh et al. (2019) found that students who made observations of…
Follow-up on the iEarth teaching conversation: Why cognitive apprenticeship?
One question came up after I had written up my one-pager on the iEarth “teaching conversation”: Why “cognitive apprenticeship”? Over the years, I made a couple of observations across several…
An iEarth teaching conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå on #WaveWatching
iEarth is currently establishing the new-to-me format of “teaching conversations”, where two or more people meet to discuss specific aspects of one person’s teaching in a “critical friend” setting. Obviously…
What does “sensemaking” really mean in the context of learning about science? (Reading Odden & Russ, 2019)
I read the article “Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct” by Odden and Russ (2019) and what I loved about the article are two main things: I realized…
Asking for the “nerd topic” when introducing workshop participants to each other to foster self-disclosure to create community
I am currently teaching a lot of workshops on higher education topics where participants (who previously didn’t know each other, or me) spend 1-1.5 days talking about topics that can…
My 3 favourite podcasts on university teaching
Thanks to Corona and my minimum of 10k steps a day, I now have a good hour every day that I increasingly often use not to quietly ponder my surroundings…
My wave watching picture book for kids is out!
A wave watching book for beginners and those who appreciate the art and science of wave watching! Now available to order here or via any book store or online dealer…
“Invisible learning” by David Franklin
Several things happened today. I had a lovely time reading in the hammock I tried to kill two birds with one stone (figuratively of course): writing a blog post about…
Metaphors of learning (after Ivar Nordmo and the article by Sfard, 1998)
On Thursday, I attended a workshop by Ivar Nordmo, in which he talked about two metaphors of learning: “learning as acquisition” and “learning as participation”. He referred to an article…
Student evaluations of teaching are biased, sexist, racist, predjudiced. My summary of Heffernan’s 2021 article
One of my pet peeves are student evaluations that are interpreted way beyond what they can actually tell us. It might be people not considering sample sizes when looking at…
An overview over what we know about what works in university teaching (based on Schneider & Preckel, 2017)
I’ve been leading a lot of workshops and doing consulting on university teaching lately, and one request that comes up over and over again is “just tell me what works!”.…
Why students cheat (after Brimble, 2016)
Recently, one topic seemed to emerge a lot in conversations I’ve been having: Students cheating, or the fear thereof. Cheating is “easier” when exams are written online and we don’t…
Published in Oceanography: How to Teach Motivating and Hands-On Laboratory and Field Courses in a Virtual Setting
One of the few “behind the scenes” shots of me taking #WaveWatching pictures! See the super awesome current right at my feet? :-D⠀ ⠀ Similar to kitchen oceanography, I believe…
Mind-set interventions
Two years ago, I was really into daily writing in my bullet journal. I used it to plan out my day, week, month, year, but also to set goals and…
Even though students in the active classroom learn more, they feel like they learn less
If you’ve been trying to actively engage students in your classes, I am sure you’ve felt at least some level of resistance. Even though we know from literature (e.g. Freeman…
A workshop on building and maintaining a mentoring network in academia
Last week I gave a workshop on “taking ownership of your own mentoring” at Kiel University again (link to the pptx slides in case you want to give a similar…
Teaching field courses in a virtual setting
For many people it has been (and still is!) a huge hassle to quickly figure out ways to teach field courses in a covid-19 world, and I can relate so…
Asking questions that aim at specific levels of the modified Bloom’s taxonomy
I’m currently preparing a couple of workshops on higher education topics, and of course it is always important to talk about learning outcomes. I had a faint memory of having…
Alles andere als trockene Theorie (Repost)
Unser “DryTheory2JuicyReality” Projekt wurde durch den PerLe-Fonds für Lehrinnovation gefördert. Hier ist ein Repost eines Beitrages, den ich für den Blog “Einfach gute Lehre” geschrieben habe. „Meeresströmungen im Wassertank“: Lehre, die Wissenschaft…
#TeachingTuesday: Student feedback and how to interpret it in order to improve teaching
Student feedback has become a fixture in higher education. But even though it is important to hear student voices when evaluating teaching and thinking of ways to improve it, students…
#TeachingTuesday: Some things I read about making good lecture videos
Just imagine you had written an article on “Student Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Asynchronous Online Lecture Videos”, like Choe et al. (2019) did. What excellent timing to inform teaching…
Anna is answering questions on our Nature article at #ShareEGU20
It feels like an enourmously long time ago that our article on “ice front blocking of ocean heat transport to an Antarctic ice shelf” got published in Nature, but it…
Using campsites for scicomm
Last summer at the Science in Public conference in Manchester, I heard a talk by Anna Woolman on science communication in campsites. It stuck with me as a really good…
Our Nature article in 20 tweets
(Not true, there were 22 tweets, but apparently I can’t count! :-D) For those of you that don’t follow my Twitter, here is what I posted over there the day…
Playing in a 13-m-diameter pool on a merry-go-round results in Nature article
A long, long time ago (ok, in fall of 2017) I got the chance to join Elin Darelius and Anna Wåhlin’s team for a measuring campaign at the Coriolis platform…
#SciCommSunday: The reason why I choose to post selfies on my #SciComm Social Media
“I don’t want my face on the internet!”, “My science should speak for itself, it shouldn’t matter who I am as a person!”, “I just don’t like what I look…
Fastest way to read up on the science of science communication? This book!
(Werbung ohne Auftrag // This blogpost is not sponsored) I strongly believe that all scicomm efforts should be grounded in the science of science communication. That means reading a lot…
Melting ice cubes experiment published in kids’ journal Frontiers Young Minds
On publishing in a journal peer-reviewed by kids, and suggesting it as a first journal new PhD students should be asked to write for You guys might remember my favourite…
My kids’ article on the formation of sea ice is out!
I recently published an article about how sea ice forms which, I think, turned out pretty well. But the coolest thing is the illustration that Jessie Miller did to go along with…
“Continue. Start. Stop.”. An article supporting the usefulness of my favourite method of asking for student feedback on a course!
I’ve been recommending the “Continue. Start. Stop.” feedback method for years an years (at least since my 2013 blog post), but not as a research-backed method but mostly based on…
Communicating Climate Change — a book you should definitely know about!
In a presentation about science communication I gave on Monday, I recommended a couple of resources for scientists interested in science communication. For example the amazing climatevisuals.org for advice on which images…
“Laboratory layered latte” – combining latte and double diffusion. Easily my favourite paper ever!
My friends know me well. Especially A&I, which was proven again when they sent me the link to an article about two things that I am mildly obsessed with: Latte…
Some things are better left unseen — research shows that watching yourself in a video meeting is not a good thing
I’m a big fan of virtual meetings: For planning outreach activities taking place in France with a team in Norway while sitting in my office in Germany (see here, and definitely…
Response of the ACC to climate change #scipoem
The response of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to recent climate change* Around and around the southern pole The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, inspiring Around and around the southern pole Seemingly without…
#scipoem on an Darelius et al. article about ice shelves
“Observed vulnerability of Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf to wind-driven inflow of warm deep water”* Let’s talk ab’t a favourite paper “Observed vulnerability of Filchner- Ronne Ice Shelf to wind-driven inflow of…
Tale of arctic melting and deep water formation #scipoem
Tale of arctic melting and deep water formation Freshwater freezes long before saltwater does, and it also floats on top of saltwater. In the Nordic Seas, deep waters are formed.…
A #scipoem on upwelling of tropical OMZ waters in a warmer climate
“Simulated reduction in upwelling of tropical oxygen minimum waters in a warmer climate”* Let’s pick apart this article’s title, inaccessible to most people out there. Even though we know it…
Double the trouble — a poem about double-diffusive mixing in the ocean
On my blog’s fourth Birthday (!!!), it’s time to try something new. How about some celebratory oceanographic poetry? Obviously the topic has to be my oceanic pet process, double-diffusive mixing……
I am missing institute seminars! Or: Why we should talk to people who use different methods
You probably know that I have recently changed my research focus quite dramatically, from physical oceanography to science communication research. What that means is that I am a total newbie…
How to make your science meaningful and accessible to any audience
Are you hesitant to do outreach because you don’t really know how to convey your message to an audience that isn’t as fascinated by your field as you are and doesn’t have at least…
What you know about science is not necessarily what you believe about science
I’ve been working in science communication research for a good half a year now, and my views on outreach are constantly evolving. When I applied for this job, I was…
Outreach is about more than about the perfect presentation (or even the perfect hands-on tank experiment!)
In most of my blog posts on outreach I focus on how to run the _perfect_ experiment. And while I still think that’s awesome, I recently read an article by…
You learn better when you explain to yourself
I just read a really interesting article on explaining to yourself as a mechanism for learning by Tania Lombrozo. We have talked about peer instruction being valuable because explaining to others helps…
You learn better when you think that you will have to teach
Have you ever worked as student tutor? Then you’ve probably felt like you understood the content of the course you tutored a million times better after tutoring it. Or at…
How to know for sure whether a teaching intervention actually improved things
How do we measure whether teaching interventions really do what they are supposed to be doing? (Spoiler alert: In this post, I won’t actually give a definite answer to that…
How to learn most efficiently when participating in a MOOC
How to learn most efficiently when participating in a MOOC? Yes, I’ll admit, that title promises quite a lot. But there is a new article by Yong and Lim (2016)…
Laborpraktika didaktisch gestalten – unsere Broschüre jetzt auch als pdf!
Am Zentrum für Lehre und Lernen der Technischen Universität Hamburg-Harburg haben wir eine Broschüre zum Thema “Die Spannung steigern – Laborpraktika didaktisch gestalten” geschrieben. Das pdf ist -> HIER <- abrufbar.
“Taking ownership of your own mentoring” – our chapter has been published!
Have you ever wondered how to take ownership of your own mentoring? Well, wonder no more and check out the chapter we wrote about just that!
How your behavior as an instructor influences how your students behave during peer instruction phases
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that how you behave as an instructor influences how your students work during peer instruction phases. But do you know what…
How your students might be hurting themselves by skipping classes
Mandatory attendance is seldomly done in german higher education. The system relies on a series of examinations, and whoever passes those get the degree, no matter how much or how little time…
Why you should shuffle practice problems rather than blocking them
We like to get into the flow when practicing something, and we like to have our students concentrate on one particular type of problem at a time until they have…
Stages of group development
Last weekend I had the chance to fill in for a colleague and help run a training course for student tutors. One of the topics was what kind of group processes…
Does multitasking hurt learning? Show ’em!
I am reading the “Faculty Focus” mailing list, and a side-note in one of their recent posts, “Why policies fail to promote better learning decisions” by Lolita Paff, really struck…
Preparing my workshop on how learning works
As you know, I’m preparing a workshop for teaching assistants in mechanical engineering at Dresden University of Technology. And even though I’ve given similar workshops successfully more than once before, it…
And even more on motivation
Last week we talked about motivation quite a bit: First about why do students engage in academic tasks?, then about how motivation is proportional to the expectation of achieving a…
Motivation proportional to the expectation of achieving a goal?
In the last post I talked about a paper on “Motivating Learners: A Primer for Engineering Teaching Assistants” by Torres-Ayala and Herman (2012). Today, I want to present a different…
Motivation: dangle a carrot rather than threaten with a whip!
Why do students engage in academic tasks? Next week I am giving a workshop on teaching large classes at TU Dresden. I gave a similar workshop there in spring, but…
Can there be “too much” instruction? Apparently yes!
I recently, via the blogpost “lessons from a toy” by Eyler (2015), came across the article “The Double-edged Sword of Pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery” by Bonawitz, Shafto, Gweon, Goodman, Spelke and Schulz (2011).…
When math hurts
One of the larger projects I am currently working on deals with connecting the math courses, which are compulsory for all freshmen at my university and taught for most students together,…
Drawing to learn II
From reading the paper on “Drawing to Learn in Science” in my last blog post, I got browsing the literature and I came across the paper “Drawing to learn: How…
Drawing to learn
On the sciencegeekgirl blog (which, if you don’t follow it already, you should definitely start now!) there recently was a post on “drawing to learn sketching and peer instruction“. She…
Of the importance of giving opportunities to practice
When you are short on time and want to teach as much as possible in a given time, how do you allocate time to different activities and are there any…
How do you make sure your students come prepared to your flipped course?
As I mentioned a while back, we are preparing a flipped course. And the biggest question always is how to make sure students actually prepare for class. Because if they…
Reviewing “ocean drifters – a secret world beneath the waves”
Do you remember how you loved watching the movie in Richard Kirby’s guest post on my blog a while ago? All that amazingly beautiful plankton? Well, here’s good news for…
Why care about ocean literacy?
Ocean literacy, the “understanding of the ocean’s influence on you – and your influence on the ocean”, is obviously a topic near and dear to my heart. But a recent paper by…
Multiple representations – a better chance to understand what’s going on?
I’m currently advising a team of teachers who have taken great care to make sure they all use the same representations of a problem. They use the same symbols, have…
Importance of designing experiments
At work, we are currently editing a brochure on designing and carrying out lab courses, and we are working on a lot of projects which aim at redesigning labs. And…
Facilitating student group work
Grouping students together for collaborative work is easy, but how do we make them work as a team? Collaborative learning is often propagated as the ultimate tool to increase learning…
Finding the right instructional method for different kinds of knowledge
When reading Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 revised taxonomy of educational objectives, I really liked how they made clear that different kinds of knowledge require different instructional approaches as well as…
Currently reading: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives
I am currently reading the Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) revised taxonomy of learning outcomes. They modified some of the higher levels of the original Bloom (1956) taxonomy and now use a continuum of cognitive processes from…
Teaching: intentional and reasoned act
I’ve talked about Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives before but I have to admit that I’ve only gone back and read the original Bloom (1956) book and the revised taxonomy by Anderson…
Conceptual change and wooly hats
“Conceptual change” is one of the big words that gets thrown into every conversation on teaching and learning these days. But most people I talk to don’t really have a…
Peer instruction! Combine it with individual thinking or discussions with the whole class?
Make sure it stays silent during the first step of the clicker process. When using clickers in class, there are many different possible ways of implementing clicker questions and peer…
How theories influence the scientific process
Observations are not as objective as we thought they were. Today I want to talk about the paper “The theory-ladenness of observations and the theory-ladenness of the rest of the scientific…
Desirable difficulties
Initial harder learning might make for better longterm retrieval. A lot of the discussions at my university on how to improve learning focus on how to make it easier for…
What do I want from my students – sense-making or answer-making?
On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them. Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given…
What’s your perspective on good teaching?
Taking a test as a basis for reflection in teaching beliefs, intentions and actions. I am always looking for ways to make teachers think – and talk – about best practice in…
Taxonomy of multiple choice questions
Examples of different kinds of multiple choice questions that you could use. Multiple choice questions are a tool that is used a lot with clickers or even on exams, but they…
Activating the backchannel
Using technology to enable active engagement with content in a large lecture. I have recently presented the paper “Enabling backchannel communication between a lecturer and a large group” at the SEFI…
Oceanographic concepts and language, reloaded
How we might misunderstand our students and therefore diagnose misconceptions where there are none. Imagine you are in an Earth Sciences class and your teacher talks about glaciers and how they…
On purpose and aim of hands-on experiments.
Why it is important to make clear the purpose of experiments in teaching. As you all know by now, I am a big fan of hands-on experiments in teaching. One…
All learning is relearning
Where did the concept of “elicit, confront, resolve” come from? We often imagine that ideal learning happens the same way we often imagine ideal teaching*: We enter a room, students are…
Kolb’s learning cycle
A very brief history of learning theories. Discussing a paper on learning theories with a friend last week, I realized how far I have come from when I first started reading those…
Development of student attention over time
Do we really know how student attention develops over time? One thing that is shown over and over again in teachers’ trainings is the curve of how student attention peaks…
Why talking to your neighbor might help more than listening to the lecturer
Why does learning through peer instruction work? As you might have noticed by now, I’m a big fan of concept questions combined with “talk to your neighbor” peer instruction. And…
Learning with fluid toys
How fluid toys can be used to demonstrate principles of fluid mechanics. I guess every attempt to hide that I LOOOOVE fluid toys of any kind is futile. So imagine…
Making science topics relevant to students’ lives increases interest and performance
Duh! That students are more interested, and hence perform better, when they are motivated to learn something sounds not terribly surprising. But did you know that you can actually increase…
Will getting it wrong help or hinder future learning?
A study shows that unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. I’ve talked about how testing drives learning a while back, and today’s post is on a similar topic. If testing…
The structural complexity of learning outcomes
The Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy. I talked about the classification of learning outcomes according to Blooms’s taxonomy recently, and got a lot of feedback from readers that the…
How to ask multiple-choice questions when specifically wanting to test knowledge, comprehension or application
Multiple choice questions at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Let’s assume you are convinced that using ABCD-cards or clickers in your teaching is a good idea. But now you want to tailor…
Classifying educational goals using Bloom’s taxonomy
How can you classify different levels of skills you want your students to gain from your classes? Learning objectives are traditionally categorized after Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. Bloom separates learning objectives in…
Giving feedback on student writing
When feedback is more confusing than helpful. The other day I came across a blog post on Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. on responding to student writing/writers by P. T. Corrigan.…
Why might students not learn from demonstrations what we want them to learn?
More potential pitfalls to avoid when showing demonstrations. Kristin and I have been invited to lead a workshop on “Conducting oceanography experiments in a conventional classroom” at the European Marine Science…
So what exactly are we testing?
Asking the right questions is really difficult. Last week, a paper by Gläser and Riegler was presented in the journal club at my work (can’t find it online yet, so…
How to make demos useful in teaching
Showing demonstrations might not be as effective as you think. Since I was talking about the figures I bring with me to consultations yesterday, I thought I’d share another one…
Should we ask or should we tell?
Article by Freeman et al., 2014, “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics”. Following up on the difficulties in asking good questions described yesterday, I’m today presenting…
Letter tubes and hydrostatic pressure
How less than 25% of the tested students give consistent answers to these problems. This is already the third blog post talking about the paper “Identifying and addressing student difficulties…
Cartesian divers – theoretical considerations
A bit more reflection on cartesian divers. When I wrote the two previous posts, I had known cartesian divers for a very long time in many contexts, for example as…