literature Archives - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading Stirling (2019) on “Engineering and Sustainability: Control and Care in Unfoldings of Modernity”

August 28, 2025

I have been reading a lot about care in teaching as the focus moved away from control and past belonging and mattering, so it was quite interesting to read a…

Now published: The book “Teaching fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental sciences”! Summary part 2

August 27, 2025

This is the second half of my summary of this book, the first half of the book is summarised in this blog post!

Currently reading about “Active hope” (Macy & Johnstone, 2022)

August 25, 2025

I’ve read and written about the importance of hope, especially when teaching for sustainability, before, and a book that always comes up in this context is Active hope by Macy…

Now published: The book “Teaching fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental sciences”!

August 24, 2025

Feels like a very long time ago, but Kjersti, Hans-Christian and myself contributed two vignettes to the book “Teaching fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental sciences“, which has now become…

Who benefits from practice testing? (Schwerter et al., 2025)

August 23, 2025

active learning

Having just written about desirable difficulties yesterday, this Schwerter et al. (2025) article on “Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?” fits the theme perfectly.

Raising the (perceived) value of attendance vs accessibility…

August 22, 2025

This morning, on my walk to my dip and back, I listened to Tom Lowe on Talking Learning & Teaching speaking about student attendance.

Notes on a presentation by Deslauriers on “The Illusion of Learning, What to Do About It, and How AI Can Help”

August 22, 2025

The STEM Education Research Centre at the University of Bergen had a really interesting presentation today (and the sketchy internet connection was more than made up for by all the…

Reading Thoroughgood et al. (2024) on why bystanders should act

August 20, 2025

microaggressions

“When advantaged group employees courageously stand up for the rights of their colleagues with marginalized identities, research suggests that they communicate a powerful, public “message of value” to such individuals“,…

Currently reading Shiffman & Wester (2025): “Scientists no longer find Twitter professionally useful, and have switched to Bluesky.”

August 20, 2025

I have complained a lot about how I miss the old Twitter that was such an important tool for me a decade ago, and most importantly during the pandemic, and…

Currently reading Shanahan et al. (2023) on “Role play with large language models”

August 19, 2025

I really enjoyed reading about GenAI as role playing, an analogy Shanahan et al. (2023) suggest to explain what GenAI does while avoiding thinking of GenAI agents as human-like.

Currently reading Gravett (2025) on “Authentic assessment as relational pedagogy”

August 18, 2025

Authentic assessment is often understood as students doing practical, real-life, mostly outside-of-university tasks (and universities are often perceived as not part of the “real world” even though they should be,…

Currently reading Lopes & Galleli (2025) on the “Pendulum effect: how formal structures and hidden curriculum act in higher education institutions’ contribution to sustainable development?”

August 9, 2025

teaching for sustainability

Lopes & Galleli (2025) look at how what happens at universities is influenced both formal structures (policy documents, …) and the hidden curriculum (informal and implicit messaging about what is…

Currently reading Shan & Illingworth (2025) on “Fostering Empathy Through Play: The Impact of Far From Home on University Staff’s Understanding of International Students”

August 8, 2025

International students are not only far from home, but they are often also in a new culture — both regarding how teaching and learning and relationships at university work, but…

Catching up on some reading about mastery-based testing and feedback

August 7, 2025

Testing drives learning, at least to some extent. Testing can also cause a lot of stress and anxiety that hinder learning. But there might be a way of testing that…

Preparing my course “Teaching for Sustainability” with the support of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book

August 5, 2025

In preparation for this fall’s online course on “Teaching for Sustainability“, I was looking into what kind of methods I want to model. And then — perfect timing — I…

Currently reading up on Classroom Assessment Techniques

August 4, 2025

I’m currently preparing several courses and this book “Classroom Assessment Techniques” has been on my “to read during the summer” pile since last summer or so… So it was about…

Finally reading THE SoTL book

July 26, 2025

I have been planning to read “SoTL in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice” edited by Chick (2023) for literally weeks, and then when I finally managed to put my…

Reading about going public with SoTL

July 26, 2025

I am still trying to read up on SoTL for a project I am working on, but keep getting side-tracked (but at least this time it is by a SoTL…

Does disclosing intention make it less likely that we act on it? No answer (yet), but a lot of reading…

July 23, 2025

Today I fell into this really weird rabbit hole on intentions and self-completion. My interest was first sparked by an article by Gollwitzer et al. (2009) on “When intentions go…

When Communities of Practice and GenAI collide

July 23, 2025

I was very intrigued when I came across a chapter by Cambridge, Wenger-Trayner, et al. (2024) on “Theoretical and practical principles for generative AI in communities of practice and social…

Currently reading Shoshani (2025) on “Teachers’ flow, emotional well-being, and optimal teaching and learning experiences”

July 23, 2025

I’ve been vaguely interested in the persistence of emotions ever since Marlis’ presentation about eco-emotions since at least mine can fluctuate enormously (which makes it very hard to fill in…

Currently reading Mårtensson et al. (2011) on “Developing a quality culture through the scholarship of teaching and learning”

July 22, 2025

Hard to believe I never summarized this paper by my own colleagues, on SoTL, in our own context at Lund University before, but here we go!

Reading up on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

July 22, 2025

SoTL

In anticipation of a big thunderstorm this afternoon I started the day with a long morning dip, postponed a meeting so I don’t have to be on public transport if…

Currently reading Noah (2025) “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education”

July 17, 2025

As you saw in my recent post on the first draft of my “teaching consultations menu”, I found a really awesome book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A…

Weltbilder, world images, and perspectives (thinking about Biesta’s work…)

July 15, 2025

Yesterday I listened to a podcast interview with Gerd Biesta called “After the age of world-view”. It is an episode in a series of podcasts as research for a book,…

Currently reading Kahane (2025): “Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement”

July 14, 2025

I found a new book that I would love to do a slow-reading book club on! I really enjoyed what we did with the Everyday Changemaker book, and I would…

Playing with a “Teaching Consultations Menu”

July 10, 2025

academic development

I discovered the book “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Tolu Noah (2025) through an interview on my…

Currently reading Sinclair et al. (2025) on “Behavioral interventions motivate action to address climate change”

July 8, 2025

Why do people fail to act against climate change, and what interventions could make them act? That’s what Sinclair et al. (2025) investigate in an “intervention tournament”!

Currently reading Gorichanaz (2023): “Accused: How students respond to allegations of using ChatGPT on assessments”

July 7, 2025

This is an article that I find interesting both because of the method (searching reddit for accounts of student experiences as data sources!) and because of the findings, which I’ll…

Currently reading Curzon-Hobson (2002) on “A Pedagogy of Trust in Higher Learning”

July 7, 2025

trust

Trust is often perceived as risky — what if students cheat, what if they don’t put in the effort we want them to put in, what if they don’t learn…

Currently reading “Addressing students’ eco-anxiety when teaching sustainability in higher education” by Eriksson et al. (2022)

July 7, 2025

It is extremely common that we experience strong emotions around climate change and all the other crises in the world. Some or all of these emotions are likely to come…

Reading about a capstone project designed to integrate sustainability in software engineering

July 2, 2025

Palacin-Silva et al. (2018) describe a capstone project developed to integrate sustainability in software engineering education. Their course has five main aims: Understanding [something technical]; Implementing [something technical] to support…

Currently reading Ross et al. (2024) on “Reflective writing as summative assessment in higher education: A systematic Review”

July 1, 2025

Reflective writing comes up a lot as The Solution to fix all kinds of problems related to students possibly not engaging and using GenAI to write their assignments etc.. If…

“Walking Through the Future in the Present”, inspired by Wilson et al. (2025)

July 1, 2025

I’m totally appropriating half of the title of Wilson et al. (2025)’s article, “Walking Through the Future in the Present”, as the name of an activity that I want to…

Currently reading Wenger et al. (2011) on “Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: A conceptual framework”

June 30, 2025

You might associate the name “Wenger” with Communities of Practice, as do I. So then it’s very interesting to read Wenger et al. (2011), where they distinguish between a community…

Thinking about what makes MOOCs work

June 30, 2025

Soleymani et al. (2025) explore “Personal Experience and Value Creation in Postdigital Education” in a large-scale survey (1227 people responded to their survey) of MOOCs run at the TU Delft.…

Currently reading: The Systems Thinking Playbook!

June 30, 2025

I found a sample of “the systems thinking playbook” online, and while there is quite some overlap with the climate change playbook it developed into later, there are also some…

Currently reading Carless (2009) on “Trust, distrust and their impact on assessment reform”

June 29, 2025

Since reading Macfarlane’s chapter the other day, I am thinking a lot about the influence of institutional policies (rather than teacher actions in direct contact with students) on trust. Now…

Currently reading Timperley & Schick (2025): “Assessment as pedagogy: inviting authenticity through relationality, vulnerability and wonder”

June 26, 2025

When I read about “eliciting wonder and joy via invitations to see the world anew” in the abstract, I knew this article would be squeezed in before I continue with…

Catching up on reading about GenAI, academic integrity, and trust

June 26, 2025

Very pleasant working day in Kristianstad yesterday, so today I am doing a sprint, reading stuff about academic misconduct, trust, and GenAI! Here we go with lots of short summaries.

Key teacher skills and knowledge for GenAI implementation? Currently reading Belkina et al. (2025)

June 25, 2025

GenAI

Belkina et al. (2025) did a systematic review of case studies of implementations of GenAI in higher education and, based on that, found key teacher skills and knowledge necessary for…

Currently reading “Examining Student and Teacher Perspectives on Undisclosed Use of Generative AI in Academic Work” by Adnin et al. (2025)

June 24, 2025

GenAI

Yesterday I wrote about how disclosing the use of GenAI erodes trust, but that it is even worse to get caught using GenAI without having disclosed it, So how do…

Currently reading Bochniarz et al. (2022) on “Attitudes to AI among high school students: Understanding distrust towards humans will not help us understand distrust towards AI”

June 24, 2025

This is a very interesting (pre-ChatGPT!) study: Bochniarz et al. (2022) investigate highschool students’ concerns regarding perceived negative intentions of AI, i.e. “cynical hostility” towards AI.

“Education for Sustainable Development Curriculum Design Toolkit” by Higgins & Calvert (2025)

June 23, 2025

I found another “head, hands, heart” model! This time, Calvert et al. (2022) use it as a frame to organise the key competencies for sustainability:

Currently reading Cech (2014) “Culture of disengagement in engineering education?”

June 23, 2025

I’m thinking quite a lot about responsibility — of students for their learning, for example in the context of active learning and co-creation, of teachers for what they are teaching…

Currently readin Schilke & Reimann (2025) on “The transparency dilemma: How AI disclosure erodes trust”.

June 23, 2025

When we teach, we have all these policies of how students need to let us know how they used GenAI, and of course the same holds for research publications. Research…

Currently reading Macfarlane (2022) on “The distrust of students as learners: Myths and realities”

June 22, 2025

trust

What is it with all the distrust in students? Macfarlane (2022) answers this question before the raise of ChatGPT when things probably got even worse… But that doesn’t really matter,…

Gandolfi (2024) on the becoming, being and (re)imagining teaching in the age of environmental emergencies

June 21, 2025

teaching for sustainability

I am currently talking a lot with LTH teachers to figure out what the thresholds are that make it difficult for them (and other teachers) to take action on changing…

Conceptualizations of weak and strong sustainability (according to Rachel Lombardi et al., 2011)

June 21, 2025

Rachel Lombardi et al. (2011) write “The overutilisation but simultaneous undertheorisation of sustainability as a term means that it can lend itself to a vast array of very divergent goals“.…

Currently reading Bicudo de Castro (2025): “Quantifying the burden of organisational bulk emails in a business school”

June 6, 2025

Big pet peeve of mine: Organisational bulk emails, i.e. emails from within the organisation that are sent out to everybody (or at least a large list of people). In my…

Exploring the UDL 3.0 version, inspired by an episode on the Tea for Teaching podcast

May 31, 2025

It took me a while to appreciate the UDL* framework since I first started looking into it 3 years ago. Without context, it seemed overwhelming in the amount of details…

The Spiral of Silence, or why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability (updated)

May 30, 2025

I like using the “Spiral of Silence” when talking about why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability, so here comes an updated version!

Currently reading Nieminen & Boud (2025) on “Student self-assessment: a meta-review of five decades of research”

May 29, 2025

There are wildly differing understandings of what student self-assessment can and should do. It can be part of supporting the learning process in formative assessments or as a valuable skill…

Pihkala (2022)’s Model for “The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief”

May 27, 2025

Today I found the model by Pihkala (2022) that I think can be helpful when thinking and talking about eco-anxiety (and that I, of course, had to recreate in order…

Roxå et al. (2025): “Entangled in context: addressing academic development and choice architecture”

May 20, 2025

My colleague Torgny Roxå had a new paper come out (on our shared Birthday no less!) on how academic development depends on context. Together with colleagues from Bratislava, they investigate…

Published! Dunnett & Glessmer (2025) “Positionality statements in engineering education: A European perspective”

May 19, 2025

Sharing is not always caring! And especially expecting others to share things about themselves that they might not be ready to share. The editorial “Positionality statements in engineering education: A…

Currently reading Ajjawi (2019) on “Persisting students’ explanations of and emotional responses to academic failure.”

May 18, 2025

What makes some students persist until they get a degree, despite experiences of failure, while others drop out? Typically, student persistence is explained with feelings of self-eﬃcacy, experiencing a sense…

How and why do students use GenAI feedback? Currently reading Henderson et al. (2025)

May 16, 2025

More reading on trust in GenAI, today on how and why do students use GenAI feedback. Henderson et al. (2025), “Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback: student perceptions of usefulness…

Currently reading Ferguson (2025) on “Norwegian higher education teachers’ beliefs about teaching, motivation, and approaches to researching and developing teaching”

May 15, 2025

I recently interviewed a bunch of teachers about thresholds they have faced and overcome, or are still facing, regarding teaching for sustainability. One question was where they would turn for…

The political dimension of teaching for sustainability (currently reading Håkansson et al., 2018)

May 15, 2025

A very common remark when talking about Teaching for Sustainability is that it is political and we shouldn’t indoctrinate our students, hence stay away from politics, and thus from sustainability…

Currently reading Sund (2015) on “Just an illusion of equality? The gender diversity paradox in Norway”

May 12, 2025

Having lived in Norway for 3 years during my postdoc, and now in Sweden for the last 3.5 years, I am often frustrated how many people misunderstand the consistently high…

Currently reading Goldshtein et al. (2025) on “The role of learner trust in generative artificially intelligent learning environments”

May 10, 2025

The title of Goldshtein et al. (2025)’s editorial, “The role of learner trust in generative artificially intelligent learning environments“, sounded super intriguing. The question of trust in GenAI is so…

Currently reading Brauner et al. (2023) on ““Trust me, do not trust anyone”: how epistemic mistrust and credulity are associated with conspiracy mentality”

May 10, 2025

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, and people who believe on one conspiracy theory are highly likely to believe also in others, even if they are completely unrelated to the first one.…

Currently reading Guthrie (2009) on “I’m curious: Can we teach curiosity?”

May 9, 2025

Teachers often talk about how they want their students to be “curious”. And what that means to them is to be asking themselves questions, but also to stay on track…

Currently reading Winner (1980) on “Do artifacts have politics?”

May 6, 2025

Recently on Bluesky, I came across a post by Bo Thomson who wrote about the article I am summarising below “I frequently had students ask “Why are we reading this…

Co-create your own adventure — our presentation at MNT 2025

May 5, 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.

“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)

May 4, 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

May 2, 2025

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)

May 1, 2025

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”

May 1, 2025

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)

May 1, 2025

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

April 30, 2025

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?”

April 27, 2025

attendance

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

April 27, 2025

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)

April 13, 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”

April 10, 2025

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”

April 10, 2025

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?”

April 7, 2025

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”

April 2, 2025

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”

March 31, 2025

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)

March 31, 2025

podcast

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)

March 24, 2025

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

March 22, 2025

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

March 21, 2025

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)

March 21, 2025

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”

March 20, 2025

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)

March 12, 2025

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

March 12, 2025

role play

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”

March 12, 2025

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)

March 11, 2025

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)

March 9, 2025

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)

March 8, 2025

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)

March 6, 2025

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”

March 5, 2025

“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)

March 4, 2025

attendance

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

March 4, 2025

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”

March 4, 2025

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)

February 28, 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

February 27, 2025

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)

February 27, 2025

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

February 26, 2025

“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)

February 22, 2025

constructive alignment

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”

February 21, 2025

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

February 21, 2025

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)

February 20, 2025

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

February 19, 2025

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”

February 18, 2025

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

February 17, 2025

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

February 15, 2025

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)

February 5, 2025

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)

February 4, 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”

February 3, 2025

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”

February 1, 2025

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”

January 29, 2025

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)

January 29, 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

January 24, 2025

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.

January 20, 2025

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)

January 15, 2025

GenAI

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”

January 8, 2025

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…

Currently reading: “The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done to Someone by Someone” by Hedvall & Ericsson (2024)

January 3, 2025

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…

From colleagues working with supervised machine learning, I learned that one of the classic machine learning fails involves sheep: one thinks one's trained the computer to recognise sheep, but what it's actually learned to do is recognise fields (green backgrounds). Since I didn't take any photos while out in the snow yesterday, I've dug out a photo of a Herdwick ewe grazing on the east side of Wasdale (Cumbria, UK) on a fine August evening in 2011.

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”

January 3, 2025

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)

January 2, 2025

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)

December 24, 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

December 17, 2024

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)

December 11, 2024

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)

December 10, 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

December 9, 2024

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!”

December 6, 2024

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)

December 6, 2024

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”

December 4, 2024

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)

November 30, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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?)

November 29, 2024

academic development

“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)

November 29, 2024

academic development

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)

November 29, 2024

academic development

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

November 27, 2024

Social media

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)

November 12, 2024

trust

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)

November 12, 2024

trust

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)

October 23, 2024

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

October 23, 2024

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

October 20, 2024

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

October 16, 2024

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

October 3, 2024

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)

October 1, 2024

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)

September 30, 2024

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)

September 30, 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)

September 26, 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

September 18, 2024

Climate Activism 101

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

September 12, 2024

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)!

September 11, 2024

“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)

September 9, 2024

“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)

September 5, 2024

academic development

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”

September 5, 2024

emotions

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”

September 3, 2024

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)

August 29, 2024

podcast

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”

August 28, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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

August 26, 2024

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

August 22, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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

August 21, 2024

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

August 19, 2024

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)

August 19, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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)

August 17, 2024

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)

August 17, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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)

August 14, 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)

August 14, 2024

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

August 13, 2024

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

August 5, 2024

podcast

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)

August 1, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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)

July 25, 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)

July 19, 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)

July 19, 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!

June 17, 2024

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)

June 12, 2024

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)

June 12, 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)

June 12, 2024

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

June 11, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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)

May 31, 2024

active learning

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)

May 30, 2024

co-creation

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

May 25, 2024

teaching for sustainability

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)

May 24, 2024

trust

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

May 23, 2024

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)

May 16, 2024

Time 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)

May 14, 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)

May 14, 2024

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”

May 2, 2024

decolonialisation

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)

April 24, 2024

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”

April 17, 2024

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

April 15, 2024

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)

April 13, 2024

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

April 11, 2024

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

March 28, 2024

trust

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)

March 27, 2024

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)

March 25, 2024

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)

March 22, 2024

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

March 21, 2024

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)

March 21, 2024

trust

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)

March 20, 2024

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)

March 19, 2024

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”

March 14, 2024

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))

March 8, 2024

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)

March 4, 2024

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)

March 2, 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

February 29, 2024

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!

February 29, 2024

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

February 28, 2024

positionality

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”

February 22, 2024

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

February 14, 2024

belonging

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…

Currently reading Part III of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)

February 2, 2024

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)

February 1, 2024

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)

January 31, 2024

GenAI

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

January 29, 2024

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)

January 28, 2024

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)

January 26, 2024

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)

January 25, 2024

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)

January 24, 2024

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)

January 22, 2024

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)

January 22, 2024

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)

January 20, 2024

corridor of tolerance

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?

January 19, 2024

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)

January 15, 2024

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)

January 12, 2024

trust

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

January 12, 2024

community of practice

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)

January 10, 2024

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

January 10, 2024

trust

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

January 9, 2024

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)

January 3, 2024

UDL

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?

January 2, 2024

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)

January 2, 2024

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”

November 21, 2023

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)

November 18, 2023

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)

November 17, 2023

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)

November 16, 2023

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)

November 14, 2023

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

November 13, 2023

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

October 16, 2023

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)

October 7, 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)

October 6, 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)

October 3, 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)

October 2, 2023

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?

September 20, 2023

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

September 14, 2023

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

September 6, 2023

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

September 4, 2023

#CoCreatingGFI

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

September 2, 2023

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

August 29, 2023

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

August 17, 2023

iEarth

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

August 7, 2023

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!

July 30, 2023

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”

July 29, 2023

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)

July 13, 2023

trust

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

July 12, 2023

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)

July 11, 2023

teaching for sustainability

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

July 10, 2023

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

July 5, 2023

game

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

July 4, 2023

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

June 30, 2023

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)

June 28, 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)

June 21, 2023

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)

June 21, 2023

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”

June 16, 2023

community of practice

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)

June 1, 2023

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

May 25, 2023

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)

May 16, 2023

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)

May 9, 2023

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”.

May 5, 2023

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)

May 4, 2023

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)

April 25, 2023

UDL

“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)

April 21, 2023

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…

“Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework” Kirsty Dunnett summarizes De Ketele (2014)

April 18, 2023

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)

April 6, 2023

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)

April 4, 2023

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)

April 3, 2023

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)

March 27, 2023

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

March 15, 2023

DIYnamics

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)

March 13, 2023

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)

March 3, 2023

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)

February 15, 2023

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)

February 7, 2023

assessment

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)

February 6, 2023

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”

February 3, 2023

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)

February 3, 2023

co-creation

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)

February 2, 2023

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)

February 2, 2023

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

February 2, 2023

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)

February 1, 2023

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

January 21, 2023

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

January 20, 2023

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)

January 19, 2023

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)

January 17, 2023

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”

January 13, 2023

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)

January 12, 2023

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)

January 11, 2023

teaching for sustainability

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)

January 9, 2023

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

January 9, 2023

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”

January 3, 2023

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

November 23, 2022

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)

October 14, 2022

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)

September 29, 2022

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

September 28, 2022

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”

September 21, 2022

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)

September 20, 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)

September 13, 2022

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)

September 2, 2022

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)

August 30, 2022

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

August 28, 2022

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

August 28, 2022

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)

August 20, 2022

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

August 19, 2022

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)

August 19, 2022

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)

July 16, 2022

literature

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)

June 28, 2022

recommended reading

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)

June 28, 2022

Recommended by CEE

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)

June 24, 2022

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)

June 24, 2022

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)

June 22, 2022

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

June 18, 2022

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)

June 15, 2022

“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)

June 14, 2022

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.

June 9, 2022

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

June 7, 2022

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

June 2, 2022

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)

May 24, 2022

‘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)

May 21, 2022

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)

May 15, 2022

for students

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

May 14, 2022

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)

May 7, 2022

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)

May 5, 2022

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)

May 4, 2022

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”

May 3, 2022

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

May 3, 2022

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)

March 6, 2022

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)

March 5, 2022

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…

Guest post by K. Dunnett: “Inquiry for Geology”

March 2, 2022

Yay, another guest post by Kirsty! Here we go:

Thinking about “Universal Design for Learning”

January 31, 2022

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)

January 28, 2022

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)

January 14, 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)

January 12, 2022

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

December 15, 2021

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?

December 9, 2021

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

December 9, 2021

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

November 16, 2021

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)

November 14, 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

November 14, 2021

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

November 12, 2021

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

November 10, 2021

podcast

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)

November 10, 2021

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

November 6, 2021

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)

November 4, 2021

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

November 4, 2021

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

November 1, 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)

October 22, 2021

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)

August 12, 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)

August 2, 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)

July 2, 2021

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?

June 25, 2021

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)

June 25, 2021

literature

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)

June 24, 2021

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)

June 21, 2021

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

June 11, 2021

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)

June 4, 2021

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.

June 1, 2021

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?

May 31, 2021

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)

May 27, 2021

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?

May 21, 2021

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

May 20, 2021

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)

May 11, 2021

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

May 2, 2021

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

April 29, 2021

podcast

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!

April 21, 2021

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

April 18, 2021

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)

April 17, 2021

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

March 11, 2021

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)

March 2, 2021

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)

February 24, 2021

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

January 9, 2021

recently published

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

December 1, 2020

intervention

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

November 13, 2020

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

November 2, 2020

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

October 7, 2020

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

September 5, 2020

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)

August 31, 2020

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

May 26, 2020

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

May 19, 2020

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

May 8, 2020

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

April 16, 2020

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

March 6, 2020

(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

February 28, 2020

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

January 19, 2020

“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!

January 12, 2020

(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

June 28, 2019

Frontiers for 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!

June 15, 2019

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!

December 17, 2018

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!

October 18, 2018

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!

December 16, 2017

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

September 26, 2017

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

September 25, 2017

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

September 18, 2017

“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

September 11, 2017

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

September 4, 2017

“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

August 28, 2017

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

August 22, 2017

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

August 18, 2017

#COMPASSMessageBox

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

June 7, 2017

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!)

July 7, 2016

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…

Waves on Pinnau in Mölln. By Uwe Glessmer

You learn better when you explain to yourself

July 5, 2016

literature

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…

Mirjam Glessmer and Timo Lüth leading a workshop for university instructors

You learn better when you think that you will have to teach

June 30, 2016

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

March 10, 2016

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

March 3, 2016

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!

January 25, 2016

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!

December 22, 2015

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

December 17, 2015

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

December 10, 2015

literature

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

December 8, 2015

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

October 23, 2015

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!

October 7, 2015

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

September 23, 2015

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

September 21, 2015

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?

September 16, 2015

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!

September 14, 2015

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!

September 7, 2015

literature

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

August 31, 2015

literature

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

August 10, 2015

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

August 7, 2015

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

July 31, 2015

literature

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?

July 29, 2015

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”

June 17, 2015

plankton

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?

June 8, 2015

literature

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?

June 1, 2015

literature

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

May 29, 2015

literature

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

May 18, 2015

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

May 8, 2015

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

May 6, 2015

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

May 4, 2015

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

April 22, 2015

literature

“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?

April 15, 2015

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

March 11, 2015

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

January 30, 2015

literature

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?

January 7, 2015

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?

December 3, 2014

literature

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

November 26, 2014

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

November 24, 2014

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

November 12, 2014

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.

October 22, 2014

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

October 15, 2014

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

October 8, 2014

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

October 1, 2014

literature

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

September 24, 2014

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

September 22, 2014

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

September 17, 2014

literature

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?

September 3, 2014

literature

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

August 22, 2014

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

August 1, 2014

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

July 30, 2014

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

July 9, 2014

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?

June 6, 2014

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?

June 2, 2014

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

June 1, 2014

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?

May 31, 2014

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

February 5, 2014

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

January 27, 2014

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…

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