Kennedy et al. (2026) motivate their study by highlighting the hugely important role that teachers play in times of geopolitical conflict and displacement, not just to meet SDG 4 “quality education”, but to support students with trauma and hardship. That means that teacher training is required at a scale that can only be met with […]
Just yesterday I was thinking about the tensions that can arise when someone thinks they are leading educational development top-down and others want to lead bottom-up, and Dineen et al. (2026) refer to the people in the middle as “umbrella carrier”, protecting people and initiatives below from unnecessary asks/tells from above, or modifying the latter […]
I’m browsing Chalmers & Hunt (2021) “University teaching in focus: A learning-centred approach” to explore it as one possible text book to give to participants in our “Introduction to teaching and learning at LTH” course, and here are some notes.
In their study, Hingle & Johri (2026) describe a 4-week module in a course on a related topic, in which students first learn about how GenAI works both technically and in society.
Bryant (2026) starts from the premise that “the decline of trust in institutions is the real existential threat for teaching and learning“. Trust in institutions, they say, has been declining for a while, but this has intensified with the availability of GenAI, and the imperfect way in which both teachers, students, and institutions react to […]
One of the seemingly most promising responses to GenAI being misused in assessment situations has been to (try to) physically exclude technology by creating assessment situations where the assessor observes what the student is doing (like in face-to-face oral or proctored assessments). But what if accessing GenAI does not require a computer or phone, but […]
In Kestin et al. (2025), discussed in yesterday’s iEarth journal club (pity I missed the discussion!), an “AI-powered tutor” is compared against an active learning class, and they find that “students learn significantly more in less time when using the AI tutor, compared with the in-class active learning. They also feel more engaged and more motivated“. […]
We often equate a university with its physical campus, despite the experiences during covid-19, or, as discussed in Suchikova et al. (2026), the relocation of more than 40 universities in Ukraine since 2014. They suggest understanding universities “as a network of relationships, practices, and shared intellectual commitments” and discuss the “university without walls” model, “in […]
“Efficiency demands that we work smarter and not harder, but is this better for our wellbeing?” That’s the question that Campbell et al. (2025) investigate in their study, and they give away the answer pretty much directly: no, since the article is called “experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning“.
I had not come across the term “attention sanctuaries” before, but somehow it spoke to me. There are so many things constantly competing for attention and I often find it difficult to resist the emails that would just take a minute (or five) to respond to, the article I could quickly read, the podcast I […]
To understand why teachers start professionalising in teaching, Bonnevier et al. (2026) analyse critical incidents in teaching. They find that teaching is overwhelmingly perceived as an individual venture where teachers feel left alone with heavy personal responsibilities, and identify four sub themes:
In this very cool project, 8 student researchers interviewed students and staff from 4 different institutions about trust and partnership under the overarching goal of exploring how to strengthen student voice.
What caught my eye about this article was that Bearman et al. (2026) write that “students prioritise their developing values and moral positions over institutional messaging“. Sounds intriguing, and somehow inspires hope in the future, doesn’t it?
This is a really interesting article where Farini (2012) analyses videos of interactions to find trust-building activities that educators do in peace education to build trust between groups of adolescents from different countries.
I talk a lot with teachers about co-creation of learning and teaching, and my own experience matches perfectly what Murphy et al. (2017) describe: “The overarching response was a positive statement followed first with a “but” and then with the issues that could be caused by a partnership approach“.
This is a really cool study: At LU, students have the opportunity to be drawn in a lottery that gives them a spot in the waiting list for affordable student housing — just by the luck of draw, independent of parental income, prior performance, or other factors that might make interpretation of the data difficult. […]
This was a fun paper to write with a really interesting mixture of colleagues, both from my current job in Sweden and my Norway days. We discuss four grass root initiatives to create communities to discuss different aspects of teaching in different formats, and why we think each of them worked out.
We use SoTL projects a lot in our academic development work, and from an appreciative inquiry approach: hyping up and building on the good practice we see and carefully addressing the rest when we feel that can be done without harming relationships. We typically talk about the very good and interesting projects we see, but […]
Most assessment practices are really not up to the job, but instead of completely rethinking, most often existing assessments are only tweaked and only marginally improved. Thomas & Widdop Quinton (2026) propose a way to do things differently by co-creating assessment in a Design Thinking-informed process in teacher education.
I’ve written repeatedly about how using GenAI for qualitative analyses is a bad idea. In this paper, Nguyen-Trung & Friese (2026) present a different, very interesting and nuanced perspective. My summary below.
I have found very little research on how or why teachers trust their students — until Rachel sent me this article and now my mind is blown. I’ve heard people say before that development of university teaching is decades behind school teaching, and it looks like this might be the case when it comes to […]
Even though this study is on writing instruction — which is probably the subject that is affected most by the presence of GenAI — I think it is relevant far beyond: What does the presence of GenAI do to teacher emotions?
For me, the space I am in is hugely important for how well I can think. In the office, I have the desk in the corner between windows, because sitting in a cubicle facing a wall makes me depressed (and interestingly, nobody else wanted my spot, since you are not supposed to have your screen […]
These last couple of weeks, I have been writing. A lot. With 19 different co-authors on several manuscripts in stages that range from first drafts to waiting for proofs (guess not so much writing recently on the latter, but anyway, they count to my “in progress” writing projects, too!). Many of these collaborations are described […]
In thinking about who trust whom and why (not), it’s always interesting to see how people talk about other people, in this case how teachers talk about first generation students.
Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden a week ago (was it only a week ago?!), I listened to the episode “Sit Spot Mindfulness” on 60 second SoTL, and then had to immediately (or at least as soon as I had internet close Møn) read the original publication by Bitting et al. (2026).
I’ve seen lots of summaries and references to the “WONKHE report” on AI, so I had to check it out. It is based on focus group interviews and a survey with responses from more than 1k UK students, and it is a bit difficult to read because it is not always clear what results are […]
Wals (2022) argues that the classical key competencies for sustainability are not sufficient, that we also need to learn to disrupt, and then learn from the resistance against that. Interesting!!
Stratford et al. (2025) describe current pedagogies that fail to engage with the polycrisis (“meta-crisis” in their article) and thus contribute to mental health struggles in students as “pedagogies of misery”, which, they argue, we should disrupt by means of “Anthropocene Intelligence”.
Another article that I read just now and that really resonated with me is Laidlaw (2026), where they explore teachers’ reactions to GenAI as an identity crisis, not a skills gap.
I remember learning about the “four ears” in Schulz von Thun’s model, where the same message (e.g. “there is not a lot of light here”) can be heard as stating a fact (“it’s dark here”), as saying something about the sender (“I’m uncomfortable when I cannot see properly”), as saying something something about the relationship […]
This is a really great book with lots of food for thought to reflect on teaching practices and bring more humanity into teaching. Since I have thought about trust and ways to build it quite a lot, as well as about inclusive (or even better, nonclusive) teaching and many related concepts, my notes below are […]
The central question in Kotz et al. (2026)’s preprint is about “understanding how to increase evidence-consistent beliefs and support for empirically grounded policy responses” on contested societal issues. They investigate whether conversations with LLMs can change peoples’ minds, and if so for what types of audiences it works best. They build on other research that […]
I always like studies that use authentic data from out in the wild. I think it is so elegant to look at what is happening in real life rather than trying to generate data and then having people not respond leading to too small sample sizes, people misunderstanding the question (which might also have been […]
Feeling that you matter — to peers, staff, university — is important for student mental health. To really understand what it means for students to matter, Smith & McLellan (2026) analyze 155 respondents’ open-ended responses to the questions of describing situations where they felt that they did (not) matter while at university.
Didn’t feel like I had time to go for a morning dip, but made the time and am glad I went, both because that’s always awesome and because it gave me the chance to listen to the episode “How college students make, keep and lose friends with Janice McCabe” on one of my alltime favourite […]
With the presence of AI, oral exams have made a strong come-back because it is harder to cheat on them. But they come with lots of problems, too: A lot of students struggle with anxiety that prevents them from showing all they know, it is difficult to assess fairly, and it is unclear whether oral […]
When I hear the term “vision”, I always think of the former german chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who is quoted as having said “people with visions should go see a doctor.” With that out of the way — sustainability science has recognized that positive visions about the future are “influential, if not indispensable, stimulus for change” […]
Teaching involves a lot of emotional labor — handling of our own and others’ emotions — especially when dealing with controversial or emotionally difficult course content, but also just in general because teaching is all about dealing with other humans. Emotional labor is also unequally distributed, with women, younger teachers, and minorities carrying most of […]
Most of the time when I have written about trust, it was about trust in the relationship between people. But trust also has other dimensions. For example, “Institutional Trust Load” according to Spencer (2026) describes trust which “is structurally relied upon to sustain administrative processes under conditions of ambiguity, inconsistency, or deferred resolution“. So trust […]
Just read this (3-page only, so check it out yourself!) article and think that it is super helpful! While we often talk about climate action as either an individual problem OR a structural problem, as behavior change OR technological solutions; in this paper it is clear that we need AND CAN DO all of the […]
Since sustainable development is a wicked problem, it is not too surprising that also students in our classes come with different ideas of how to meet the challenges, and that that can lead to conflicts. I am doing some reading around how people deal with this in response to a colleague asking me what to […]
I am preparing a self-study module for students in their 4th or 5th year in engineering programs taking a course on the polycrisis and the stuff they will have to deal with in their professional lives, and below is a first draft. This module is a voluntary offer for students in addition to in-person opportunities […]
Yesterday, I participated in a workshop by the Swedish Education for Sustainable Development working group, and it sparked a lot of thoughts. The workshop was one of those formats where the agenda is set at the beginning of a meeting, based on what topics participants bring. In my breakout group, we discussed whether it is […]
I am so excited to finally read this book! There are so many things to think about, and so many practical tips and tricks; I totally recommend any online teacher to read it (and even in-person teachers, it will definitely be good for you to read, too!).
I browsed this book and I think it is SO USEFUL, especially probably for people who don’t have a ton of experience with leading staff development workshops.
Climate emotions are often discussed as individual. Although it is often suggested to talk about emotions and to find supportive community to process and deal with them (see for example the steps talk and unite here), most often there is no discussion of how emotions are shaped by society in the first place. Peters et […]
There are tons of different formats for regular academic development events with the goal to foster and enhance discussions of teaching and learning, each with their own theory of change and responding to different boundary conditions. In this paper, we compare three that were run within the iEarth project.
In a world where more and more people carry trauma, we need to assume that there are students in all our classes that do, too. How can we make sure to teach in ways that reduce harm, avoid re‑traumatization, and support all learners’ capacity to engage and learn?
We know that relationships in teaching are hugely important — many students say that they’ve been one conversation away from quitting, and good relationships have positive impact not just on retention but on lots of other outcomes. Teachers are expected to initiate and build relationships, and especially in the classroom, since that is the only space […]
I like to think of myself as fairly pragmatic, so I was intrigued about the body of literature that uses pragmatism in SoTL or teaching and learning more generally. While I found a lot of it to be a slightly more elaborate version of “do the best with what you have”, so really not very […]
I always advocate for talking about sustainability even when you feel not ready to do it, because I believe that not talking about things is never a good solution. But I realized in a conversation last week that I am making a lot of assumptions about how comfortable and skilled people are in moderating conversations, […]
Loved reading this short piece in which 419 qualitative researchers from 32 countries write very directly that they reject GenAI in reflexive qualitative research because 1. GenAI is incapable of meaning-making; 2. Qualitative research needs to be done by humans; and 3. GenAI is too harmful to the environment and to the human workers who […]
Not gonna lie, when already the second line of an abstract contains reference to some guy-who-I-have-never-heard-of’s “conceptual distinction” of something, I find it very hard to motivate myself to continue reading. On the other hand, the title sounds so relevant that I still did it. This is my summary of what I understand from Van […]
I first wrote about Alasdair Skelton’s book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“ before I had even read it, based on a presentation Alasdair gave online. This time round, I am looking at the story in a different way. Quite literally, as I am now reading the book rather than listen to Alasdair […]
I finished reading bell hook’s book “Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom” a couple of weeks ago, and a sentence very early on resonated with me so much: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy“. Yes, that’s why my job is so important! When I read that […]
Even though I have nothing to do with health education whatsoever, this article really sparked my interest. Osborne et al. (2026) “highlight the importance of recognising that any aspect of curricula which explore human experience may overlap with students’ lives“, and that should be the case also in all of my teaching (see my thoughts […]
We like to think of the educational system as a meritocracy, where people are rewarded and advanced purely based on their performance, but at the same time most people know that it is not. In my own work we have looked at first-generation students, students whose parents have not been in higher education, and I […]
There is a youtube channel that I have recently discovered that I love and just have to share after I found myself looking at the view in the featured image, talking on the phone with my friend about the channel: A former game designer, Marie-Jo Leroux, now gives advice on effective gamification of learning in […]
There is a “study out of MIT” that somehow absolutely dominated my LinkedIn feed a couple of weeks ago (the source really typically given as “study out of MIT” or very similar, so I had to do some digging to find it! But maybe the clue should have been in the missing citation already…). Anyway, […]
In the context of mental health and higher education, who has a duty to care and what does care even mean? Byrom et al. (2026), in “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education“, distinguish three ways to approach care:
Suter et al. (2026) argue that given the urgent need for action against climate change (and seeing that pretty much all available research shows that it doesn’t influence researchers’ reputation or credibility to be activists and scientists, those are not excuses!), more people should combine activism with at the same time figuring out what works.
In the preprint “How AI impacts skill formation” by Shen & Tamkin (2026), study participants are learning a new Python library either in a control condition or with an “AI assistant”, and researchers observe how the participants prompt AI during learning and measure completion times and quiz scores after learning. They find that “AI-enhanced productivity […]
I see statistics on social media every day about 1 in 3 young people who say that there are topics they talk about with an AI but not with another human. And almost all our students report that they use AI for learning, because they aren’t being judged, they don’t feel like they are bothering […]
How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“.
When browsing Zeivots et al. (2026)’s article “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education“, one sentence caught my eye: “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“. Since I am currently really interested in partnership and negotiations there, I then had to read […]
Intriguing title! Lodge et al. (2023) discuss a “quadrant typology of human and machine interactions for education” with the two axes individual-to-collaborative and extending-to-offloading. Calculators fall into “cognitive offloading“, meaning it’s individual and offloading.
I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate […]
I keep coming back to Karen Costa’s question “What if the critical #AI skill for our era is not how to use it, but how to resist it?” In the Poulidis et al. (2025) chess study, 40% of those who learned with AI and could press a button to get help said that in hypothetical […]
I am still on the “tyranny of participation” trip, this time reading about students’ experiences in peer discussions and inequities in roles that students take on in those discussions. Generally, we assume that students learn through peer discussions, but we also know that not all students learn equally in that format. What are the barriers […]
Usually we like to think that self-regulation in feedback seeking and learning is a good thing: When students get stuck, they can ask for support that helps them overcome the difficulty and continue learning. This can become problematic, though, when students ask for hints too early and often, get used to that behaviour, and then […]
This is one of these texts that I wish I had known earlier: to give to students to help them understand their learning, but also to teachers as a super easy introduction to how to think about difficulties in learning: “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance […]
Innovation seems to still be one of the favourite buzzwords around, and in teaching, it often means fancier technology, larger group sizes that purportedly have even better learning outcomes, and all of that, of course, based in evidence showing typically large numbers of some sort. In this framing, Thirkell (2026) writes, “[p]edagogical innovation risks becoming […]
As I am thinking more and more about the details of our upcoming MOOC on “Teaching for Sustainability”, I am less and less convinced that I actually want to have automated certification at the end. So Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous […]
The other day I wrote about a paper on “sycophantic AI” and its implications on human interactions, and I am reminded of that daily when I hear kids on the bus mention how they talk to “chattis” (which seems to be a common nickname for ChatGPT around here) about all kinds of topics (which is […]
AI detection products cannot produce output to reliably distinguish between an AI generated text and one written by a human, and they reflect biases (for example more often flagging non-native speaker texts — see also my recent post about the “GenAI writes like me” post). We’ve known that for a while now, so why summarize […]
Torgny told me to read this, so I did… I only skimmed most of the details of the US landscape of centers for teaching and learning, but I found it really helpful to read about the Hub-Incubator-Temple-Sieve (HITS) framework (short introduction of the four lenses also in the evaluation guide for centers for teaching and […]
Shreedhar et al. (2026) is a really important study on climate action and social media strategy: When you want to get people to do something (for example sign up for a talk), it’s much better to tell them to do it (“do not stand by idly!”) than to ask them for support, and it is […]
After reading about the “tyranny of participation” the other day, I looked into some more literature citing Gourlay (2015) to possibly get some ideas of how to encourage cognitive engagement without assuming what that would look like from the outside.
Fitton et al. (2026) describe a the difficulties that teachers describe in working with a project aimed at decolonizing the curriculum, and that might partly explain why there is so little progress on decolonialization.
Since listening to Gerry’s defense of his PhD thesis the other day, I have been thinking about partnership a lot, and how we need to practice partnership also in order to practice democracy. And I vaguely remembered having seen an article where the typical “ladder” is wrapped into a circle, so that rather than being […]
Very intrigued by that title, especially since I just wrote about student engagement as something positive, that all universities claim to want! Gourlay (2015) describes that traditionally, student engagement is described as behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with a learning situation (and possibly beyond), other people in the context, and the content — often set […]
Why is it that even though most people agree (and most university policies state) that active student engagement is desirable, there are still large lecture theatres being built? Loughlin (2025) explores the “theory of action”, which distinguishes between what people or organisations say they do (for example in mission statements or policies; “espoused theory”) and […]
No matter how sick I am of GenAI, this is a cool paper! Magnani & Clindaniel (2025) look at lots and lots of GenAI generated texts and images — both generated with a generic prompt and with one specifically asking for scientifically correct representations — depicting Neanderthal behavior and compare it to what science actually […]
Last week, I had a great day listening first to the trial lecture and then the defense of Gerald Decelles III’s PhD thesis, and it was so inspiring! Both his trial lecture and defense were such excellent presentations that I have to compile my notes into a blog post to process my thoughts. In the […]
While some people see big potential in GenAI to make learning and teaching more inclusive — by leveling the playing field through providing people with personalized instruction and support that they might otherwise not get — it is of course not as easy as that. GenAI is only as good as the data it is […]
Late last year, we had a “Transformation Thursday” lunch on philosophy of science, led by a colleague. Now we will follow up on that with a journal club on Nagatsu et al. (2020)’s “Philosophy of science for sustainability science“.
It is really difficult to know if students have learned what we wanted them to learn, and especially when we have to collect evidence of that learning for a valid assessment — the best we can do is look for proxies that we take to stand for bigger and more complex outcomes. But “[t]he proxies […]
I am still deep in my asynchronous online learning phase, and the paper by Yang et al. (2026), “Applying a Think-Pair-Share (TPS) Structure to Asynchronous Online Discussions (AODs): A Mixed Methods Study”, looked super interesting!
In an old blog post, I wrote about the importance of facilitation/teaching presence in the context of the pandemic and people teaching on video calls from their homes. In there, I refer to one article that refers to lots of older sources, and I think now I finally read one of those…
Ignoring for now that an important aspect of a teacher giving feedback to students is what it signals about the relationship — that the teacher cares enough about the student and their learning to invest time and energy into understanding the students’ thoughts and figuring out how to help them improve — how good a […]
I’ve dabbled in this when I was working with science communication, but now in the context of developing our MOOC, I am interested again in how we can utilize micro-opportunities for learning — commute times, waiting in a doctor’s office, even bathroom breaks. There are so many times when people are on their phones and […]
Somehow there is often talk about educational ecosystems and everybody seems to have an intuitive idea of what that means. I decided I needed to find some references that actually provide definitions or at least more context, and that wasn’t as easy as I had thought! I am summarizing two papers below, though.
What we believe about climate change often does not depend on what we know about climate change, but on what people around us believe. This makes it really difficult for climate scientists to make their warnings heard and acted upon by people outside their own bubble. In their article “Who do we trust on climate […]
There are often tasks that everybody agrees are important, but that for some reason do not get implemented. In Sundström & Holmberg (2018)’s paper “When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations” they investigate this issue in the context of information security, but I am (surprise!) mostly curious about what we […]
“Sustainability educators face a conundrum in the midst of climate collapse: what if to teach truthfully is to break hearts? What if teaching with the most current and rigorous research is tantamount to inducing hopelessness, anger, and anxiety?” This is the introduction to Williams and Grain (2025)’s article “Teaching in a Time of Climate Collapse: […]
I’m getting a bit sick of reading GenAI papers, but I guess not reading is also not an alternative… And this one is actually very interesting!
I just saw that Kjersti, Cathy’s and my article has been replaced as the latest publication on IJAD’s website, and that “What is good academic development practice? Introducing Australasian standards” by Harvey et al. (2026) has been published on the first of January this year! Which I of course have to read right away, because […]
I have a bunch of articles that were recommended during our LTHEChat on teaching sustainability last year that have been sitting in a special folder, waiting for a day like today where the best thing to do (right after a dip and a looong, comfy breakfast) is to curl up on the couch and read. […]
I was recently sent Clara Hallgarth’s Master’s thesis on “Educational Methods for Fostering Sustainability Competencies: A Toolkit for Integration of Sustainable Education in Engineering” (thanks, Clara!) and really enjoyed reading it; it’s a treasure trove of great references and even better ideas! I am summarizing my main takeaways below, but keep in mind that this […]
One reason why sustainability education is so difficult is that in contrast to many other things we routinely teach, we cannot just take some teachable product, but need to transform teaching itself. Teachers need pedagogical knowledge of sustainability, and Sandri (2022) explores what “pedagogy” even means in the context of sustainability education, because while often […]
LTH has been running Pedagogical Inspiration Conferences since 2003, with the 13th conference happening in December 2025. I was really impressed by the number (and quality!) of presentations on teaching sustainability there (see my summaries of the contributions below).
Published on the 23rd of December! Check it out here! K. Daae, C. Bovill & M. S. Glessmer (23 Dec 2025): How academic developers can use modelling to promote active learning and co-creation, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2025.2602863
Ok, “How to SoTL” is only the working title of the paper and the name of the Teams group in which we all collaborated, the actual title ended up being “Developing a scholarly approach and contributing to conversations about teaching and learning“. But: that paper was just published last night in Oceanography!
I did not return to my practice of reading one chapter of the “Stories of Hope” book every day right after I returned from my vacation and just too much stuff happened everywhere, but luckily we are reading it in our book club, so now I needed to read until the end of part III […]
In a nutshell: “hand movement can boost impact“! And especially if one uses “illustrator” gestures to make content easier to understand, one is perceived as more competent and thus more persuasive.
In the Affective Learning Model, the premise is that learning is shaped by emotions. Teachers that show care and concern positively influence students’ emotions, so they are more willing to engage in learning. In our own work, we have shown that affect is the category of trust moves most frequently mentioned by students. Generally, relationship […]
Encouraging active participation in class is often a goal since it is correlated with better learning outcomes, but that became a lot more difficult when teaching had to suddenly move online in 2020. But maybe not all about online teaching was bad, or at least not for everybody?
Most teachers I talk with recognize that asking GenAI to grade student exams is a terrible idea, but when it comes to formative feedback, there are a lot of teachers that think that that is maybe not such a terrible idea. Students can get feedback much more promptly than if a teacher has to read […]
While I have worked on student sense of belonging myself, I have also long been wondering if it is not much more complicated than that. Hamshire et al. (2025) write that “[w]hilst seemingly well-intentioned, these assumptions [about how if student only feel belonging, they will come to class and learn] don’t always engage with wider […]
A while back in Bergen, I had a writing session with three of my favourite colleagues, on a project which we have nicknamed “how to SoTL” — writing a low-threshold introduction to SoTL for busy teachers, with the idea that people who might be interested in publishing in TOS Oceanography or the Nordic Journal of […]
The wide availability of GenAI has introduced challenges to relationships between teachers and students and within the respective groups (see for example Rachel’s and my work on that!). GenAI being able — and to unknown extent being used — to perform actions that before had to be done by humans creates different perceptions of what […]
Hockings et al. (2018) write: “Over recent months and years, the balance between contact hours and independent study time has been one focus of attention, the underlying assumption being that fewer contact hours means poorer value for money and lower quality learning experience“. And that assumption is super common! But: “The number of contact hours measures […]
I am sitting on the ferry sailing towards Germany, with new-found appreciation of the Öresund bridge and its harp-style carrying cables… And I am listening to a conversation with Michelle Miller on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Tea for Teaching, on “teaching from the same side” (what a nice, figurative bridge to the featured […]
What competences do educators need to Teach for Sustainability? Corres et al. (2020) review 14 articles that describe educator competence frameworks (all of them from within Europe, but not chosen for that specific reason!). My main takeaways below!
Today, I finally watched Anne-Kathrin Peters’ keynote at the Teaching and Learning conference at the University of Bergen (check it out here), and in it she mentions the article “Pain and pleasure in working with sustainability and transformation at a Technical University: An exploration of the role of educational developers through collaborative autoethnography” by Peters […]
Together with my colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni, I ran a workshop at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference 2024 — and now the proceedings have been published!
Rachel Forsyth and I are in the process of doing focus group interviews with students and teachers at Lund University on how their relationships to each other are influenced by the availability of GenAI. We are going to present a glimpse into the analysis of what teachers said in the first five interviews at LTH’s […]
Teaching in Higher Ed with host Bonni Stachowiak is really one of my top 3 all time favorite podcasts. Today, I listened to her talking with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer in an episode on “rethinking student attendance policies for deeper engagement and learning“, and they talk about it in a way that really resonated […]
I was listening to an episode of “dead ideas in teaching and learning” on my walk back from dipping this morning (now you can really see that fall has come!) and I really enjoyed it and can well imagine using as at “recommended listening” to prepare participants for workshops on AI and/or assessment.
I really had a hard time getting started with this article by Meyerson & Scully (1995) on “tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change“. They introduce that ““Tempered Radicals” are individuals who identify with and are committed to their organizations, and are also committed to a cause, community, or ideology that is fundamentally different […]
This blog post contains the second part of the summary of the Hamann et al. (2025) book on “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” (summary of Part 1 here), but I want to start out with something I learned in Mel Robin’s podcast this morning, and that is the difference between “stress” […]
In the book “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” by Hamann et al. (2025), I came across Wandercoaching, a peer-coaching initiative for sustainability initiatives at universities. They share the materials they use here, and I really liked the “tools for your sustainable university” guide full of different methods — many of them […]
I read this book on my vacation and loved it! It is written for activists (that aren’t actually called activists, so that everybody can feel included whether they identify as activist or not, but I want to claim the word) and written by activists with large expertise in climate psychology research (and who also disclose […]
This article investigates five schools in Belgium and Sweden doing “open schooling”, a very specific approach to developing and conducting teaching and learning, but I think the results are still super relevant and transferable to other situations where the goal is to teach for sustainability!
Preparing for a presentation that Terese and I will be giving soon at the “Inclusive Lund University” conference on how the inclusion and sustainability communities very much want the same thing and therefore should cooperate much more than they currently do, I came across the book “All means all” and the chapter on “The Magic […]
This feels like a bit of a throwback to my science communication phase (for example reviewing the book “communicating climate change” in 2018, or “communicating climate change to young people” in 2014), but it’s always good to remind yourself of the basics…
Student attendance has been a hot topic for a while now. In this study, an impressive 101 interviews with students from one first-year course on what teacher behaviours influence their attendance are analysed. They find that structured guidance, promoting active participation, acknowledging students’ feelings, and teaching performance are the most important categories.
This is a nice little study! Do students use their phones (in a disruptive way, not to respond to a teacher-posed Menti question or similar) more in certain types of physical spaces, and more in certain instructional settings?
I really enjoyed reading Nguyen and Welch (2025)’s exploration of using GenAI to analyse qualitative data. They come to the same conclusion as Rachel and myself in our article (don’t do it!), but they very comprehensively look at different problematic facets, and explain them in detail.
Trust is important for learning and it’s the teacher’s job to create conditions in which trust can develop, but can there be too much trust, to the point where it inhibits critical thinking? Kelland (2025) looks at this question, starting from a definition of trust as an attitude towards other people that we hope will […]
In this article, we investigate sense of belonging of students in STEM courses at the University of Bergen, Norway. We find — as expected from studies in mostly a US context, but for the first time investigated in a Scandinavian culture with generally high gender equality — that women report significantly lower sense of belonging […]
In this article, we investigate students’ experiences with active learning at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway (where we have put a lot of effort recently into introducing co-creation).
It all started out with me listening to one of my all-time favourite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, to an episode on designing video with intention and authenticity. Actually, it started before, with me reading about “Relational Pedagogies” by Gravett (2022), but I could not find a way to start a blog post about the […]
I recently started the daily practice of reading the book “Stories of hope: reimagining education” (first blog post here), and this is how it continues from day 4 to day 11 (and where I take a break for the foreseeable future to focus on rest and recovery).
One-on-one tutored students perform 2 standard deviations better than students who learn via traditional instruction. Can LLMs achieve similar results when acting as tutors? Typically, help-seeking behaviour is influenced for example by self-efficacy and task difficulty, availability of tools and their perceived usefulness, and possibly trying to balance independence and learning with reliance on a […]
Including the student perspective in quality assurance of teaching is required by law in Sweden (and other places), and this means that they are asked to respond to surveys at the end of every course, have seats on all boards of education and others, and have strong, institutionalised student organisations. But of course there are […]
A lot of young people experience eco-anxiety (and old people, too, but they are not the focus of this study; but see here some numbers from Marlis’ recent talk). There are a lot of suggestions on how to cope with eco-anxiety (see the same blogpost, and also the models by Pikala, or the Hope Wheel, or […]
In Dunnett & Glessmer (2025), we pushed back on the idea that listing identity facets was a good way to do positionality statements in publication or the classroom, and stress that instead, reflection and a declaration of impact of facets was needed. And here comes a great toolkit for “robust reflexivity“!
Sometimes, it is really difficult to navigate cultural expectations around teaching for sustainability. My colleague Léa and I just published a “perspectives” article about an experience in Léa’s teaching that we reflected on together.
I am challenging myself to read one chapter of “Stories of hope: reimagining education” per day. Here is how it has been going for the first 4 days! In this series, I am summarising the “stories of hope”, but I am also reflecting on the practice of daily reading. I started out by collecting the […]
Wickström (2015) states that the (Swedish) academic development has become dominated by very few concepts and theoretical models, mostly constructive alignment, Bloom‘s and SOLO taxonomy, and deep- and surface learning (which, funnily enough, I complained about here just recently. And just to make it clear, in the article it is used without the “approach”, which […]
Constructive alignment is basically the simplest idea in teaching: Figure out what you want students to learn and how you would know that they learned it, then figure out what they need to do in order to learn that. But it is also controversial, because of its origins and because it was implemented as a […]
We are using the book “Academic Teaching” by Elmgren and Olding in our “Introduction to Teaching and Learning” course. They came out with a new edition this year (2025; and to be fair, it was Elmgren and Henriksson before!) and we’ve got it in the office now! Here are my notes on a super quick […]
This article sounds so relevant: How do we teach to say “no” to unethical or harmful behaviour (and, in extension, future research (which is where the authors are heading), or maybe, me thinks, participating in other collective harmful behaviour towards, for example, the climate)? This comes from a very different disciplinary context from mine, so […]
Ramp & Hummels (2025) describe the peer-consultation method “carousel“, “a method to facilitate the exchange of perspectives of different actors working in parallel on different challenges“: Each presenter gets 30 minutes to present a project and ask 2-4 peers for input and feedback.
Academia and activism, how do they go together? I’ve been curious about that for a while, as evidenced by these posts. Today I came across an article that investigates not only academic activism, but activism in the classroom.
We are discussing more and more about the importance of hope when talking about climate change and general sustainability questions, and I wrote about different approaches before (for example, Webb (2013)’s five types of hope, which are patient, critical, sound, resolute, and transformative hope, and Macy & Johnstone (2022)’s Active Hope). And now here is […]
A very common advice, in my experience especially when we feel overworked, or struggle with climate anxiety, is that we should invest in some self-care, be kind to ourselves. Turns out, however, that this might not the best advice.
In a study of 869 students of the University of Glasgow, Hill-Harding et al. (2025) find high level of negative climate emotions: Powerlessness, helplessness, sadness, anger. Many also report impairment due to climate anxiety. When rating agreement with different statements, participants agreed strongly with statements like “People have failed to take care of the planet” […]
I read this paper on the bus this morning, but in a nutshell: it investigates PhD students’ research self-efficacy (i.e. the confidence in ones own ability to do research) and help-seeking behaviour, both of which are important to develop during PhD studies.
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 very similar discussion on engineering and sustainability!
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 & Johnstone (2022). And I finally got my hands on it (access via LUB)!
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 available!
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 kind people in the room that started streaming it from different angles!): Louis Deslauriers on “The Illusion of Learning, What to Do About It, and […]
“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“, according to Thoroughgood et al. (2024). And this message can have more effects in addition to signaling to the colleagues with marginalised identities that they […]
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 how I have been looking for, and into several different, alternatives. And here is a paper that confirmed my impression that science Twitter has moved […]
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, as Lockard & Bloch-Schulman (2023) also discussed). Recently, authentic assessment is even sometimes called upon as the antidote to students cheating with GenAI.
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 socially accepted in the context, for example through jokes). They investigated a document analysis and conducted interviews with professors and students at universities in Brazil. […]
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 also just coping with everyday life outside of university, they might struggle with language, visas or bank accounts (ask me how I know…), or constantly […]
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 actually benefits learning without causing too much stress: Mastery-based testing, provided it is combined with good feedback!
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 started reading of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” […]
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 time I moved it to my desk and dug into it! The book exists in much newer editions, this just happens to be the one […]
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 hands on it in one of the university libraries (summer opening hours here are a joke!) I had already invested so much energy into this […]
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 book. After a super quick detour from the book to an article it cites, on my favourite topic still, social media, that is…. :-D).
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 public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap?”, where they find that disclosing intentions, if the disclosure is noticed by other people, can make it […]
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 learning”. They tell the story of how a contribution by ChatGPT — despite being prompted by a participant in a group conversation, and read out […]
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 any surveys that is asking about emotions because I never know whether they want to know how I feel right this second, or on average […]
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 the thunderstorm is as bad as predicted, and now decided to read a whole folder of articles about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) […]
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 Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Noah (2025). Before I show you how I applied the book to a course […]
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, which I think is a brilliant idea — record interviews with the double use as interesting podcast episodes AND data for research! Bam! Plus this […]
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 love to read Kahane (2025)’s “Everyday habits for transforming systems” with a group of close colleagues so we can think through what it means for […]
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 favourite Tea for Teaching podcast, and it is such a treasure trove!
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 summarise below.
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 what we want them to learn — and therefore, there are dozens of rules in place that very much restrict students’ freedom and guide them […]
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 up for out students, too — because of topics in the courses we teach, or because they are informed citizens, in our classes or outside. […]
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 the needs of an organization; Mastering [something technical] Understanding [business challenges of something technical]; and Applying [something technical]. So originally, the course was very much […]
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 they had to write a reflection on their learning, they would surely have to engage, right? Wrong. Of course GenAI can write nice reflections if […]
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 try to help teachers make the transition from imagining new ways of teaching to actually doing it. Inspired by what they did, but then also […]
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 (of practice — a learning partnership in a specific domain with a shared identity and commitment to learning together) and a network (which is about […]
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. They use a value-creation framework, which categorises value into five cycles: immediate, potential, applied, realised, and transformative, and investigate how participants perceived the MOOCs in […]
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 cool things in the early version that got dropped (hopefully only for space and not because they realised they don’t work to teach what they […]
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 I am reading Carless (2009), who writes that “accountability can be a source rather than a remedy for distrust“.
My notes on GenAI stuff are getting shorter and shorter, and that’s because I am reading the articles with a specific application in mind, and only writing down what seems relevant to answer that question. So don’t use these notes-to-self as summaries that tell you all you need to know about those articles, that’s not […]
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 my scheduled reading list for the week. I have previously written about authentic assessment, and most recently about assessment for inclusion and distinctiveness, so this […]
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 GenAI implementation: Basically, being able to use GenAI for adaptive & personalised feedback and personalised learning; being able to use it in diverse teaching strategies; […]
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 students handle this? In their study “Examining Student and Teacher Perspectives on Undisclosed Use of Generative AI in Academic Work“, Adnin et al. (2025) investigate […]
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.
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 — but I actually have a long history with thinking about teaching for responsibility in a different context. My first ever publication on teaching and […]
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 also finds that students expect a two-way transparency (Luo 2024), meaning they would like for us to disclose how we use GenAI. In general, the […]
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, because his main argument is that there is really very little evidence that cheating has gotten any worse over time, despite the introduction of the […]
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 their teaching to put a focus on sustainability (or the polycrises, or however you want to call the big challenges of our time). Teachers in […]
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“. Or, in other words, as long as sustainability is just a vague buzzword, it is easy to accept, but that is because it is also […]
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 experience often without any obvious thought behind why this message needs to go to everybody, and how to make it efficient in information transfer. So […]
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 that we are supposed to consider when designing teaching. Initially, I tried making sense of all the different facets by finding examples of what they […]
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 to master in itself to support future learning, or part of measuring learning outcomes in summative assessment.
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 the “educational choice architecture” (ECA), the boundary conditions that nudge teachers towards certain choices, much like big department stores get customers to buy things they […]
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 European perspective” by Kirsty and myself that is now published (contact me for a pdf if you don’t have access!) has been in the works […]
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 of belonging, and valuing the curriculum. Failure and dropout are often explained with personal (e.g., gender, grades at entry exam, preparedness, study habits), institutional (e.g., […]
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 and trustworthiness“, use responses from approximately 7000 students to understand their thinking regarding to their use of GenAI.
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 inspiration and support if they wanted to develop their teaching. Despite me asking this clearly in my role as academic developer in their institution who […]
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 teaching. My take on that is that everything is political since politics is about how we want to live together in society, but that there […]
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 rankings in international comparisons of gender equality as actual gender equality. Yeah, maybe it is worse in most other places, but based on my personal […]
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 relevant; do students trust GenAI, and to do what, and why? And what does that do to their relationships with their teachers?
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. How come? In the article I’m summarising here, Brauner et al. (2023) investigate the traits that correlate with believing in conspiracy theories.
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 investigating them until they have found an answer, by which time they have probably at least a dozen new questions that they now also pursue. […]
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 in a class on …?” My answer was always the same: One day your choice of how to select, develop, or use a technology may […]
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 of my union, the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers.
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 of Part I here, Part II here)!
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 to talk about Teaching for Sustainability to join us), I talked about how I had recently seen the “thumb war” game intervention to show how […]
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 with systemic biases on the individuals that need to be “fixed” (see here for women, and here more generally), and in Gonnaught (2024) the focus […]
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 the difference in student performance!
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 two of the goals is a common justification of why their research is relevant and important. But in many cases, the SDGs are not used […]
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 other ways elsewhere. But even though students have proven that they can learn well on their own, for social reasons it is still nice for […]
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 favourite article on “carving space to learn for sustainable futures“, I absolutely wanted to attend despite feeling overwhelmed and overworked and close to burnout. And […]
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 Self-Reports of Cheating” by Henslee et al. (2025). I really enjoyed reading about Ellis & Murdoch (2024)’s educational integrity enforcement pyramide recently, but that’s a […]
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 together, but then I got really excited about the “don’t set goals, set systems” part that I feel is often missing in my work.
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 a binary view is not helpful, but describe “motivation transformation”, a process that can transfer extrinsic motivation into intrinsic. In that view, extrinsically motivated learning […]
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 details of the situation have changed since 1990 (and very much not for the better), the overall message is still as relevant now as it […]
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 to work for equitable learning opportunities. In a nutshell, it is as bad here as it is everywhere else…
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 successes”.
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 guests Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel about cultivating critical teaching behaviours. Starting from the assumption that good teaching can be learnt, but that it also […]
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 having been a fan for a long time (and blogging quite a bit about research on, and practice of using, social media), I’ve been using […]
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 al. (2024) open on my computer for months, but now that I am going into a week of vacations (yay!!) it’s time to close documents, […]
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 ever. But in contrast to direct plagiarism where a source can easily be identified, the use of GenAI to produce text in assignments can mostly […]
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 are really doing all of this. Yesterday, I did have the chance to discuss the purpose of education for a while with colleagues, though, and […]
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 is it a feeling of belonging, or is it care, or all of it, or something else? Nobody knows right now, and it gets even […]
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 role play, where students take on roles that they might find themselves in in the future. I do not have a lot of experiences with […]
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). Traditional assessment practices often discriminates against people in so many different ways that I had not really carefully considered before.
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 split them into 5 groups à 5 students each. That is their home group, that they sit at one group table with for the duration […]
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 entire curriculum for educating students to handle complex situations. Most commonly, changes are made at the single course level which leads to a lack […]
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 I have to read it…
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 slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three […]
“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 without the instructor, who is later informed about the points that the students agreed on were most relevant to convey. In Kordts et al. (2025) […]
In many studies, student attendance of scheduled teaching activities has been found to correlate with student success. However, attendance pattern got majorly disrupted with the Covid-19 pandemic, and seem to not have gone back to “normal” levels and even declining, and many teachers perceive this as a bad sign. At the same time, academic achievements […]
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 higher education context, as student or teacher, and reflect on it in the context of the theory they learn during the course. While most participants […]
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 the selfie, from left to right there are Emily Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Sarah Hammarlund, and Robin Costello working on coding responses (missing only Kate Kiani […]
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 entertain the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as […]
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, here are some things that give me hope today. First, and importantly, seeing how Kiel, where my letter should have gone, has voted even though […]
“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 al., 2022)
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 list! And I am really not sure what to make of it yet. Help me understand!
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 at Lund University. Below, I am summarising the points that stood out to me, unfortunately without acknowledging who made them, because I was so focussed […]
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 path of letting people take pictures of disciplinary content out in the real world and sharing it on Twitter, which then became #WaveWatching, and now […]
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 play, “the state of the world is not the work of ignorant people, but rather the opposite, the result of work made by people with […]
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 with everybody, and in person at the two hubs. I have always liked the combination of online and in-person teaching!
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 that I then read; combined with not posting to Instagram or Facebook any more and instead dumping all my (n)ice pictures directly here on my […]
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 breath on the way down, on the way up I can linger, observe, and document. Building such small (or larger) moments into life and work, […]
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 “Vent diagrams” were introduced). Now, reading the third part of the book felt so empowering. The Talmud quote that I modified for this post’s title, […]
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 for people who hate reading”, and I have been thinking about that a lot. I have explored what GenAI can and cannot do (for example […]
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 how much work a teacher vs a student should put into learning, and I have been thinking a lot about how also the room influences […]
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 persist at university, and succeed? Or does success depend on other factors than their motivation? And how should we, as teachers, react?
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. In a nutshell, my main take-away then was that “the process is the point”. We cannot achieve healing and justice in school (which is what […]
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. “Just for fun, let’s plug it all into ChatGPT!” Rachel said. And so we did. And after 4 seconds, out came an analysis that looked […]
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) or something of that sort. Plus of course more sophisticated models. But turns out that Sustainability Communication is a much big field than I realized! […]
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 introduction, because one sentence in the acknowledgements (that I was going to skip) caught my eye: “writing from bed is a time-honored […] way of […]
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 in the article “Gender Differences in the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Higher Education: Characteristics and Consequences”. They used responses of almost 2700 […]
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 Narong (2024)’s framework.
I really enjoyed reading the Gravett & Ajjavi (2022) article on “belonging as a situated practice”, especially since I see a connection with other thoughts I am having on place-based learning (inspired for example by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and several of Servant-Mikols works) that I cannot quite put my finger on yet, so it was […]
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 here I am reading up on it. Hedvall and Ericsson (2024) summarise it in their article’s title already: “The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done […]
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 questions. Enter Kirsty:
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 first interviewed Peter and myself, we jumped on the opportunity to continue discussing it with her, and then also with students, who we started to […]
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) make the point that maximum openness, while maybe well-intended, is not necessarily optimal.
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 — and I would do mine substantially different now after a lot of thinking has gone into the topic!], and then us reading an article […]
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 terms of thinking about the problem itself, possible solutions, and the way there. Lönngren, Ingerman & Svanström (2017) investigate this in the context of water […]
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 me. They write that “education for sustainability is, by necessity, value-based, place-embedded and emancipatory, seeking to help learners develop a desire to connect – to […]
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 a search term that seems to produce quite a different set of results. In contrast to the literature I summarised on Friday, where guilt is […]
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 “that makes them feel guilty”, and also say that is why they do not want to talk about sustainability with their students. To me, that […]
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… But then calling for “brave spaces” instead does not help a lot either. Brave spaces demand bravery from everybody, so far so good, but what […]
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 to talk through their course with someone who can provide a very different perspective on, for example, sustainability, yet it is not happening. Everybody is […]
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 last 50 years of failed education for sustainability would be empowering in any way. But that changed as I started browsing, so I decided that […]
“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 & McGrath, 2020)
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 changes to teaching practice. So what to do about that?
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” (or more recently, the “returner problem“): Despite sometimes enthusiastic responses during academic development workshops, these most often do not translate into changed teaching practices. There […]
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 the aspects of cultivating a big network, self-expression (btw, I wrote a blog post on some interesting research on that here) and professional branding. But […]
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 half of it was inaudible on the recording due to wind!) for her and other’s study on what teachers do to build trust with students. […]
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 situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like […]
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 connect disciplinary content to everyday experience and also to reconnect with the fun of it, and our forthcoming vignette in a Teaching Fieldwork book, in […]
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 make sense of key competencies in sustainability and how to assess them, but then I recently stumbled across a Future Learning Design podcast interview with […]
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 (that has been accepted for publication in IJAD, woohoo!) on what makes students trust teachers, and what that means for us as teachers.
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 course — in an audio file, where he (with seagulls screaming in the background) tells the story of us meeting on a dock, ready to […]
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 an article about “A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003) and moderate a discussion about it. Below, I am summarizing the article and adding some […]
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 transformative sustainability learning theory (Michel et al., 2020)!
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 student preferences at the beginning of the semester, what they actually end up doing, and what they think benefits and pitfalls are. Very interesting!
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 is a good summary. In a study of more than 30 million grading records in a Learning Management System, Wang et al. (2024) find that […]
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 complex world. For example, the pyramid view of society with some king/head of state/CEO at the top, supported by a small elite of sorts, supported […]
“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 and 16, respectively, on the list of the most cited researchers in the world. (They have a staggering 1 148 467 citations between them as […]
“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 for longer, but to support future learning. Resource-intensive courses or practices might become more sustainable if they have far-reaching consequences beyond just the course, and […]
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 think in those terms to understand better why some colleagues do what they do!
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 then our discussions on the topic. But it was just too interesting and relevant not to!
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 actually digging into the list. My summary of all of it here!
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 become my work, how my identity is wrapped up in my “adventures in oceanography and teaching”. And another symptom is that I really like to […]
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, be, in order to be able to do it? Of course there are also frameworks for this! Here I am summarising the UNECE (2012) framework.
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 an attempt to manage work load while still reading most of what I want to read, I picked the two chapters that had the most […]
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 to engage and share resources via all kinds of channels (in the chat, backchannel, tweets, posts, during the webinar and folks watching the recording — […]
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 my main takeaways (but you should really listen to the episode yourself, they have a great way of making their points!).
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 by Libertson (2023) on “Inner transitions in higher education in Sweden: incorporating intra-personal skills in education for sustainable development”.
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 in an article they wrote 10 years before (Wiek et al., 2011), they show a graphic that I have re-imagined here, and where I included […]
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), so the article “Implementing competence orientation: Towards constructively aligned education for sustainable development in university-level teaching-and-learning” by Wilhelm et al. (2019) sounds like it could […]
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 what other people have done and what I can learn from that. Today, the “you have a part to play” toolkit for higher education for […]
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 run over a year with 8 half-day workshops that each included preparatory tasks. Three years later, three of the five projects are still going strong, […]
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 makes the exact same point and explains it with expectancy-value theory. See my 2014 summary of Hulleman & Harackiewicz (2009), or even better, read the […]
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 part two & three.
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 difficult to teach. I’ve tried different things with Pierre (with a super easy introduction to rotation in labs that we taught) and Kjersti and Elin […]
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 Cathy and Kjersti in beautiful Voss! Check it out here, and enjoy!
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 comment recommending the article “Beware of botshit: how to manage the epistemic risks of generative chatbots” (Thanks, Ian!). In that article, Hannigan, McCarthy and Spicer […]
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 article has given me new language (not just the “bullshit” word*, just keep reading) to talk about a highly problematic aspect of GAI.
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 (2022). This is my summary of their Part I, and I was really positively surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book so far, […]
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 with wicked problems in general (although there is some helpful literature out there that we can start from). But when doing this, we need to […]
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 blogpost below for a super boiled-down summary of my takeaways from the whole book. I really enjoyed reading this book, especially because of its focus […]
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 I have been at the fringes off for a while now, looking at the public parts of the course on their learning management system, and […]
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 most still lecture too much” caught my eye.
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 “The politics of facilitation: Balancing facilitator authority and learner autonomy”, and suddenly I have a super helpful framework to think about these things!
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! Almost 200 methods, what a treasure for inspiration! They are grouped into “protest and persuasion”, “non-cooperation” and “intervention” (getting more and more confrontational), each with […]
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 of the elements that we saw in our study, too. I had to redo their figure in order to process it, and here is my […]
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 “Social Media Entry Model” for teachers to enhance student learning outcomes, by Machado et al. (2024), and here I am again… Curious enough to read […]
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 on “The Science of Communicating Science — The Ultimate Guide” by Craig Cormick, and “Communicating Climate Change” by A. K. Armstrong, M. E. Krasny, J. P. […]
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 from 1993 says a student shall demonstrate for a Degree of Master of Science in Engineering, and what Redman & Wiek (2021) suggest as key […]
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 to my blog post, where she shares her reflections on her own positionality and also on why and how we need to be careful with […]
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 evaluation, in the context of cooperative learning. My summary below, and the strong recommendation to read what Oakley et al. (2004) have to say about […]
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, but increasingly the view of student engagement is widened to include forms where students take more ownership of their own learning, for example when becoming […]
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 “wicked problems” in teaching for sustainability seemed so interesting that I had to go and read (and summarize) them myself…
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, there is no consensus yet, and many aspects, like a sense of belonging, or the teacher caring, or trust in teachers, have been investigated. Here […]
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 to. It is about how some people find joy and meaning in almost everything they do, whereas for others, the experience of life in general […]
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 and forget about the world outside that needs attention, and how it is “cruel optimism” to suggest to people that all can be well if […]
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 question in the student-led “SpeakUp Days” survey at LTH. And it turns out: Student trust teachers who show that they care about students (most typically […]
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 students’ sense of belonging in Bergen a while back. The results are very interesting, mostly because they are very similar to what we have read […]
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 what participants feel is relevant. One topic I have traditionally included, and talked (and written) about, is how to react when being target, witness, or […]
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 operationalise learning outcomes and, obviously, ways to assess them. Below, I am summarising two articles to get a quick idea of how one might do […]
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 my favorite podcasts a while back, go check that out!) about articulating our Scope of Practice. And since I am feeling extremely overwhelmed at the […]
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 how politely we should be talking to GAI in order to get the best results.
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 several courses, as are inspirational presentations, or individual seeking of informations in podcasts or blogs. Those approaches depend both on what individuals seek out, and […]
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 super inspiring, and she mentioned the “Liberating Structures”, which I then realized I had never blogged about before. So here we go!
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 following the Kinchin et al. (2018) article on “Researcher-led academic development”, so before I could do that, I had to read… And that spiralled a […]
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 al. (2023) report on how since 2011, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, has gradually implemented sustainable development in their programs and culture.
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 peers… Many scales include an aspect of “fitting in”, which is then sometimes turned around on students as pressure to fit in with their peers, […]
Teaching for sustainability is about so much more than teaching the content and skills described in the SDGs, or even the cross-cutting sustainability competencies. Today, I talked with teachers who asked what they could do in their courses where the curriculum does not mention anything related to sustainability, and if they should even do anything. […]
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 content and approaches”, and my first part of a summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices here comes my last bit […]
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 content and approaches”, here comes my summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices
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 someone pointed out how students appreciate the “human-like” interactions that students have with ChatGPT, and Rachel sent me a study that also shows that.
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 L. Merry and Tom Lowe are exploring on the “Talking Learning and Teaching” podcast.
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 second summary post on PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches
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
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 looking around at how other places teach similar courses. I saw that the course in Stockholm assigns the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and […]
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, that I can’t stop thinking about.
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 teaching. Here is (part of) the literature we base this understanding on (a lot of this from in-house research, or close collaborators).
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? Does that work in a similar way, or how is it different?
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 wasn’t aware of, on “Teachers interacting with students: an important (and potentially overlooked) domain for academic development during times of impact” (Roxå & Marquis, 2019), […]
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.
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 one? Short answer is that teacher-student relationships are really complicated, and those three are only some of the facets that are important, but there is […]
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 TONS of great ideas of what we definitely want to do) and negotiating priorities (i.e. cutting ideas back to what is realistic(ish)) for both myself […]
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 they talk about teaching, cognitive, and social presence, which I want to link to in another post I am working on. But either I cannot […]
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 now really need to sort out my reading of “trust” literature, which means putting it in my external memory, aka my blog. So here we […]
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 one of the first ones I wrote was about the “head-hands-heart” framework. I’m reposting what I wrote for the other blog below, but then I […]
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 point and it slowly grew on me. Before I came across the “office analogy” for brain functions, I found it difficult to understand the structure […]
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 to create in students since from what I had read, it hinders learning. But my colleague Léa recently sent me the meta-analysis by Tannenbaum et […]
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 we include learning prompts to support learning? Yes to both! Continue reading for my summary of two articles on those topics!
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 I got very detailed instruction and support in writing letters to committees (actually, maybe I did not even write those letters myself, now that I […]
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, but are those moves actually effective in building trust? What makes students trust their teachers? That’s what we investigate in a pilot study that we’ll […]
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” metaphor for brain functions) and from participants (for example Damien & Rhiannon’s “design for the edges” below, a very inspiring read!). And now at the […]
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 how to make this work in practice. So here are my thoughts!
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 cruise itself, and then writing of cruise reports. We wrote it up and submitted it for a forthcoming book on field teaching (which I will […]
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 of the traditional formats of assessment hard to justify. We had to come up both with guidelines for the participants in our course on how […]
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 act as guides to “younger” students when they do experiments for the first time, thus lowering the threshold of engaging with equipment, acting as role […]
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 this article on “What Students Value in Their Teachers – An Analysis of Male and Female Student Nominations to a Teaching Award” by Wennerberg et […]
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? In the literature, grades have been connected to stress and anxiety for students, more cheating, less cooperation, less thinking, less trust — so ultimately less […]
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, 2005) — a great introduction on how to work with rubrics (and only 2.5 pages of entertaining, easy-to-read text, plus an example rubric). My summary […]
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 process itself enough. Definitely worth reading! :-)
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 meet such wonderful young people (wow, I feel old). But it’s true! I facilitated the Biodiversity Collage and that gave me new motivation to read […]
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 purposes, like designing courses with Universal Design for Learning in mind, or for my freediving club’s summer camp, or the iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 (yes, […]
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 is an exact percentage of students that must answer a question correctly for a teacher to move on to the next topic. Or that sort […]
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 in an upcoming course play UDL Bingo, where participants check boxes if they notice that we are doing something to make the course more accessible, […]
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 vision and am excited to repost below!
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 the professor cares, and how three emails can already make a difference!
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 quite a long way from our first version as a postcard!). I am currently very much on the bingo-as-a-tool-to-nudge-people-to-do-stuff trip (see also my “Universal Design […]
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 to help build it with my own students — as an interview as part of one of her research projects. And now there is a […]
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 Kinchin (2023), who also suggests five “moves” that would be required to move towards an ecological university. A super interesting perspective! (Thanks for sharing this […]
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 Fresk (which I also got introduced to when I got to play it in a workshop led by my awesome colleague Léa Lévy, and which […]
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 sustainability teaching in a holistic way!
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 evaluating, who they could communicate with, and what tools they had access to. And we might want to restrict access to some or all of […]
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 blog, volunteered to send me the summary of what I had missed! Thanks for sharing, Kirsty, the floor is yours:
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 I looked at it, it seemed quite inaccessible, so I put it on the “for when I have time” pile. But reading it this time […]
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 the beginning I had to explain what my role of “academic developer” even entails, since this kind of job doesn’t exist at many universities. And […]
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, through the lens (mixing my metaphors here, but you get the idea) of how to show students that they matter to us as teachers.
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 & Hodari (2022). My take-away in a nutshell: Ignorance is bliss. It’s totally worth a read!
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 summarized one of them: “Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do” (Steele, 2011), which is what I am doing below. (The […]
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 very relatable and thus great to discuss, both to identify a current stage for yourself (and possibly teachers you encounter?), to reflect on that, and […]
“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 Design for Learning feel like a manageable task, and one that can be done one small step at a time, rather than something so huge […]
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 et al. (2019). The article includes a lot of really helpful examples of what this might look like in practice. Below is a summary of […]
I’m back to browsing the “menu” in my new favorite book, “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). If you haven’t read the first blog post about the book, you might want to read that one first for context.
I found a new YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!-book: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). It is aimed at students and it might be the most important thing students ever read in school…
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 (Université de Louvain, Belgium)
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). Take it with a pinch of salt and go read the original book! These are just my two cents on the points that I find […]
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 with a pinch of salt and go read the original book! These are just my two cents on the points that I find especially relevant […]
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 classes” by Darby & Lang (2019), and it did not disappoint! I loved it (my only complaint: why didn’t they call it “Tiny Teaching”??? What […]
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 and formulate a certain number of questions, that are then discussed in groups. This leads to people being able to fill in gaps in their […]
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 and a presentation at the MNT conference in Stavanger tomorrow! For those of us who can’t be there, here is what she will talk about.
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. But the article is nevertheless worth a read (and the current reading in iEarth’s journal club!), because the arguments supporting that claim are nicely presented.
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 something I really wanted to read, but at the same time really did not. For most of the last year, I have pushed so hard […]
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 higher education” (Forsyth, 2023). It is a really comprehensive introduction to assessment and totally worth a read, as an introduction to assessment or even just […]
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 a big fan of slow travel (as evidenced by for example my series of blog posts on the two day trips each way it takes […]
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 about external, biophysical factors for a long time, and climate change was thus seen as a challenge that can be solved by technology and policy changes […]
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 to give students. That’s something that we obviously need to consider all the time, especially if we are working towards co-creation: For what tasks or […]
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 hard to summarize. You should check it out yourself, of course, but here are my key take-aways.
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 it was. Trying to read more about it it turns out that maybe it isn’t as clear a concept as I had hoped, or maybe […]
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 the same thing now in an article by Öhman & Sund (2021) as a model for sustainability commitment.
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 will act out of fear (and I just recently wrote about how anger can be a constructive emotion leading to action), or draw more positive […]
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 of course experiencing negative emotions like feeling anxious or hopeless or angry is not only happening to our students, but also to us. I attended a […]
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 identity” (link to my summary of the book and some later work on CoPs). What I find really helpful to think about in the CoP […]
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 what we actually mean by “teaching sustainability”. It is clear that this is not a good title for my course, but we haven’t come up […]
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 review of 60ish biology syllabi as well as the literature of what should be included, and pointers on which group of students especially benefits from […]
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 seeing? A really interesting way to structure this through writing is the Decision/Explanation/Observation/Inference method by Van Duzor (2016).
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 pretty excited when I found this article by Block & Paredis (2019), arguing for actually not needing a “waterproof and objective definition” of sustainability; on […]
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 courses. What can we do then? Two elements are critical: Teacher presence and interactive course design. Lim, Arif and Farmer (2022) present a case study […]
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, and now I am trying to write a conference paper on what we discussed there. So naturally, I am starting out by re-reading the literature […]
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 in the literature, I came across Cohen, Steele & Ross (1999)’s “The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide”, which I’ll summarise below.
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 out because we are working so much with belonging and ingroup/outgroup issues right now. My summary of that article below: Identity and emergency intervention: How […]
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 for others, they have to develop a good grasp of the material themselves, figure out a sequence, fill any gaps in prior knowledge, etc.. Also […]
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 degrees of overlap of the circles for “self” and “academics”, which I thought was neat. The reason I found the article was because I was […]
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; and the general idea behind this project is to first get a baseline of student experiences, and then figure out how to make all students […]
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 thing that has struck me is how many seem to be teaching about sustainability without actually believing that we can and will “fix” the big […]
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, from the article Inspiring Action, Efficacy, and Connection: Weaving Sustainability into Environmental Science Curriculum through a Connected Learning Model (Bertossi & Halliwell, 2020)
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 know who wanted me to read it, but I am glad I did! See my summary below.
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 an anxious world“. So now I am determined to actually read that whole issue! My short summaries of the first 7 articles below.
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 come out of me being a bored babysitter because A&I(happy anniversary, btw!)’s kids are always just too well-behaved and were sleeping, and I was on the […]
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 a visit funded by iEarth* that led to a lot of good discussions amongst our colleagues about what we can do to increase students’ sense […]
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 choice. Especially when it happens at the right time, when we have created conditions for students to actually want to be told about stuff. One […]
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 found helpful: “Achieving transformative sustainability learning: engaging head, hands and heart” Sipos, Battisti & Grimm (2008)
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 article I recently read and found interesting: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)
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 recommended by my colleagues: On educational assessment (Hager & Butler, 1996) and on variables associated with achievement in higher ed (Schneider & Preckel, 2017)“, Peggy […]
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 activities of personal growth. This discomfort might lead us to not engage as much with an activity, or even avoid it, but what if we […]
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 & van Merriënboer (2013) How we teach is, of course, influenced by what we believe about “what works” in teaching. However, persistent urban legends are in […]
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. It sounded so interesting that I decided I had to read it*, and I am glad I did! The book is full of small (really, […]
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 quality (Harvey & Stensaker, 2008)) here. And please keep sending me articles that inspire you, I really enjoy reading and summarising them! :) First up, recommended […]
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 for our current thinking. And I want to make sure I read them all, so here are summaries of the first (and, as of just […]
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 episode, and, occasionally, the Amazing If Squiggly Careers, which I also find super helpful in navigating my own squiggly career), and I will take that […]
“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 idea. It would make learning, even learning “for the test”, so much more relevant and motivating, and it would prepare students so much better for […]
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 the event, and if so to what extent and in what form, or is it better to stick to business as usual to give students […]
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 initially wrote this for a newsletter to all teachers at my faculty, but then I also wrote a second – much more hands-on-“three-things-to-do” – version, […]
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 the first presentation and visit the infinite bridge! Last week, I attended my first ICED, The International Consortium for Educational Development’s, conference. And since I […]
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 include, and of any other comments you might have! As it says in the title, this work is incomplete and in progress! “The rights perspective, […]
‘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 in theoretical courses. However, many different activities and types of activities can be assigned this label. This review article examines the educational research and development […]
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 much that I cannot longer ignore it. So I read a couple of articles that — I hope — give me a good overview over […]
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 al. (2013). A lot of what I write about on here is about how we can improve our own teaching, but another really important aspect is […]
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 It” (Daae & Glessmer, 2022) has just come out today! In it, we describe Kjersti’s experiences with using portable whiteboards that students use to collaboratively […]
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 the feedback process, based on an article by Huisman et al. (2019) on “The impact of peer feedback on university students’ academic writing: a Meta-Analysis”. In that […]
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 grades, but in a formative way to engage students in thinking about learning outcomes and how they would know when they’ve reached them. Kjersti has […]
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), who compared methodolocical skills in research proposals written by graduate students. This is quite interesting, because while many graduate students enjoy teaching, there are only […]
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 short summary, check out this page), which means that we are playing with different ways to frame our understanding of co-creation and students as partners […]
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 at our change project through many different lenses in order to find out which ones are most relevant to help us shape and plan the […]
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. Heffernan (2021) finds them to be sexist, racist, prejudiced and biased (my summary of Heffernan (2021) here). There are many more factors that influence whether […]
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 change”, but more and more beyond that, too). Kezar & Holcombe (2019) say we should use several theories of change simultaneously to make things happen, and […]
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” side of things is to think about UDL: “Universal Design for Learning” (Brand et al., 2012). The general idea is that, instead of making accommodations […]
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, which I think everybody should read. It describes three situations in which microaggressions occurred, one from the perspective of perpetrator, witness and target* each, and […]
[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 does not mean that my thoughts are bad or not important — I think there is still a lot of good stuff in them! — […]
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 posts in the works, too!). Just now, I read about “Quality culture: Understandings, boundaries and linkages.” by Harvey & Stensaker, 2008. The article first starts […]
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 teachers and students on a continuum from “just” actively engaging students towards fully shared responsibility, i.e. “co-creation” or “Students as Partners”. We give 13 different […]
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 with some resistance, both from students who need to put in more work, and from teachers. An article by Cook-Sather (2014) sheds light on difficulties […]
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, relatedness in the environment I am building, or what can I tweak to create conditions in which these contritions for feeling intrinsically motivated are more […]
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 in an introductory course in meteorology and oceanography (GEOF105) at the geophysical institute, UiB. The students come from two different study programs: BSc in climate, […]
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 (Reinholz et al., 2021), which I am summarising here. Why are people interested in change theory? In order to change a system (for example to […]
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 educational change”… Communities of practice are often used as a model for “learning through participation”, describing how culture influences how knowledge within organisations is built […]
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 a new model to plan and ealuate change arose of observations of “the school reform paradox: change without difference”, i.e. a century worth of school […]
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 to regularly when I’m going for walks and that I can fully recommend! And by “fully recommend” I mean that I listen to all new […]
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 the topic super helpful. They provide a free e-book on the “8 steps to accelerate change in your organization” which I want to summarise here. The […]
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 recommended the chapter by Hodgson (2005). She mentions “vicarious experience of relevance” in the context of what makes a good lecture. In addition to the vicarious […]
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 in very different roles: teachers, administrators, deans, network coordinators, and it’s a great opportunity to connect with people and to do some really focussed thinking […]
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 legat and conducted together with Jakob Skavang, Elin Darelius and Camille Li, that we started last year at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen: Bringing together […]
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 learn from and with each other. This year, the GLF was organised in a hotel close to Oslo, and attended by more than 100 participants, […]
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. One student, Sverre, told me about having read articles on learning and teaching as part of a normal geoscience class (how awesome is that? Hat […]
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 university internationalization ‒ was not in fact essential.”. This, naturally, led me directly to the original article on “Online conferencing in the midst of COVID-19: […]
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 in the geosciences, and one that is difficult to grasp as we’ve noticed when teaching about Coriolis force and how trajectories look differently depending on […]
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 really started seeing the huge potential and getting excited about it since I met Catherine Bovill. Cathy and I are colleagues in the Center for […]
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 sure we get a final result that is correct (and that the student learns something, obviously). The summaries are then collected into a booklet that […]
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 representations of information, and other people that learn best from reading, or from listening to lectures, and that those are traits we are born with. […]
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 my qualifications!), and then the next day feeling all kinds of stereotype threats triggered in a video call where I noticed I was the only […]
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 below their faces. But that really does not have to end once we are back in lecture theatres again, because even in large classes, we […]
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, Kirsty has been working on developing practical work, and a central part of that has been finding out the types and amount of experiences incoming students […]
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 read and since been thinking about) by Buck et al. (2008) on “Characterizing the level of inquiry in the undergraduate laboratory”. In the article, they […]
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 methods (like, for example, concept cartoons and role plays), but two things especially sparked my interest, so that I read up on them a little […]
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 the world, so that they henceforth voluntarily engage in a new-to-them practice of sensemaking on this new topic, and perceive it as valuable. There are […]
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 the world and recognized how they might be explained by concepts from their classes were more likely to stay in their major than those who […]
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 universities in three countries: Students learn a lot of factual, conceptual and formalized procedural knowledge, working mainly on textbook data and problems. They often have […]
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 I volunteered to be grilled, and despite me trying to suggest other topics, too (like the active lunch break and the “nerd topic” intro in a […]
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 that “sensemaking” is the name of an activity I immensely enjoy under certain conditions, and being able to put words to that activity made me […]
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 feel emotional and intimate and where I want to create an environment that is open and full of trust, and where connections form that last […]
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 or catch up with friends in a phone call, but listen to podcasts. I am very selective about what I want to listen to, but […]
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 that can find books using their ISBN :-) I wrote this book such a long time ago (read about the process here and follow the linked […]
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 the book I read (which I really loved) and try a new-to-me format of Instagram posts: A caroussel, where one post slides into the next […]
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 by Sfard (1998), and here is my take-away from the combination of both. When we talk about new (or new-to-us) concepts, we often describe them […]
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 statistics (“66,6% of students hated your class!”, “Yes, 2 out of 3 responses out of 20 students said something negative”), or not understanding that student […]
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!”. Here I am presenting an article that is probably the best place to start. The famous “visible learning” study by Hattie (2009) compiled pretty much […]
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 have students directly under our noses, and to instructors it feels like cheating has increased a lot (and maybe it has!). We’ve discussed all kinds […]
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 that wave watching is a great tool in education and outreach, especially during times where activites have to be socially distant. My article “How to […]
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 reflect on how I was doing achieving them. During that year I felt really efficient, accomplished, capable, and it definitely felt related to all that […]
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 et al., 2014) that active learning increases student performance, it’s sometimes difficult to convince students that we are asking them to do all the activities […]
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 workshop yourself). This is one of my favourite topics to talk about (especially in combination with how to use social media for that purpose; and […]
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 much! But I’m also getting more and more excited about the possibilities that are opening up when we think about fieldwork in a new way. […]
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 developed some materials (when still working at ZLL together with one of my all time favourite colleagues, Timo Lüth) to help instructors work with the […]
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 begreifbar macht Über eine Lehrinnovation, die auf Kleingruppenarbeit und „hands-on“-Praxiselemente setzte – und was in Zeiten von Covid-19 daraus wurde. In der Lehrveranstaltung „Atmosphären- und […]
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 aren’t perfect judges of what type of teaching leads to the most learning, so their feedback should not be taken onboard without critical reflection. In […]
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 decisions all around the world! Choe et al. compare 8 different video styles (all of which can be watched as supplementary material to the article […]
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 was in fact only a little more than two months ago. Only right after, life changed so drastically that it feels as if it’s been […]
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 idea. Now I came across the recent article by Woolman (2020) on that study that I found so inspiring, so here are my thoughts on it for […]
(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 our Nature paper got published: Published online in @Nature today: “Ice front blocking of ocean heat transport to an Antarctic ice shelf” by @a_wahlin @nadsteiger […]
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 in Grenoble for several weeks. I was there officially in an outreach officer-like role: To write and tweet about the experiments, conduct “ask me anything” […]
“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 like in pictures!”, “People won’t perceive me as professional when I include selfies in my science communication work!”: There are many reasons for not posting […]
(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 of original literature, or … reading this book that I recently found. It’s a quick and fun overview over the current understanding of what works […]
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 experiment with the ice cubes melting in freshwater and saltwater. This experiment can be used for almost any teaching purpose (Introduction to experimenting? Check! Thermohaline […]
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 the article: Seeing this illustration (and, of course, having the article published) was a super nice surprise during the busy run-up to my big event, […]
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 my positive personal experience with it. I have used this method to get feedback on courses I’ve been teaching a couple of weeks into the […]
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 to use to communicate about climate change (plus lots of images that even come with explanations for what purpose they work well, and why!). And […]
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 and double-diffusive mixing. My obsession with latte is a fairly recent thing, but I have been known to blog about interesting convection pattern in it […]
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 check out the product of that planning meeting, Elin Darelius’ & Team’s blog from a 13-m-diameter rotating tank!), when giving a lecture in Iceland from […]
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 a goal Going east, east, east, untiring East, east, east, admiring! Around and around the southern pole Around and around the southern pole To “the […]
“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 wa(-a-a-a-a)rm deep water” An ice shelf is ice that is floating on top of the sea as it’s flowing down from a continent this one […]
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. If there is a lot of freshwater, less deep water can be formed. The sea freezes over. Ice then insulates, prevents heat flux, shutting down […]
“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 as vital to communicate clearly, be able to share, what goes on in iv’ry towers detrital, to whom it is relevant, as well as where. […]
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… Double the trouble Heat mixes by molecules bumping into each other and clunking momentum transfers so fast it all blurs the warmer the faster […]
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 (well, not total any more, but still on a very steep learning curve), and that I really appreciate listening to talks from a broad range of […]
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 some background knowledge? Then here is a tool that will help you make your science meaningful and accessible to any audience! First: There is a need for […]
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 convinced that if only the public knew what we (the scientists) know, they would take better decisions. So all we need to do is inform […]
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 Johanna Varner (“Scientific Outreach: Toward Effective Public Engagement with Biological Science”, 2014) that made a lot of points that I have definitely not stressed enough […]
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 both the “others” and the explainer, and it’s really common to hear student tutors say that they only understood something really well when they had […]
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 least that’s what I hear over and over again: People feel like they understood a topic. Then they prepare to teach it, and realise how […]
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 question, I am only talking about a paper I read that I found very helpful, and reflecting on a couple of ideas I am currently […]
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) called “Observing the Testing Effect using Coursera Video-Recorded Lectures” that tells us a lot about how (not) to learn. We have talked about the testing effect […]
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 you can do to make sure that student discussions are reaching the level of critical thinking that you want? I.e., how do you construct classroom […]
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 they have spent inside university buildings*. At the same time, there is a push for mandatory attendance because people feel that only if they force students […]
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 mastered it, before moving on to the next. But is that really the best way of learning? Spoiler alert: It is not! In a 2014 […]
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 they should be prepared to encounter and how to deal with them. Here is more or less what I told them about Tucker’s 1956 model […]
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 a chord with me. The article is about how to modify policies (like no screens! compulsory attendance! etc) to help students understand why behaving in […]
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 somehow happened that I changed my plan a bit here, and then changed a bit there, and am now constructing the whole workshop from scratch. […]
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 goal. Today I want to bring it all together a bit more, by presenting two other theories (both also described in the Torres-Ayala and Herman […]
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 theory, also described in that paper: Attribution theory Attribution theory basically says that motivation is proportional to the expectation of achieving a goal. Three […]
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 because of its success I’ve been given twice as much time this time around. So there is a lot of exciting content that I can […]
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). The article sets out to find out whether children primarily learn from instruction or from exploration. 85 pre-schoolers are divided into four groups that are […]
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, with the other subjects they are taking at the same time. Our assumption (which we are testing as we are trying the new setup) is that […]
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 producing graphical representations enhances scientific thinking” by Fan (2015). There, even more reasons for why we should use drawing in instruction are given. Drawing as […]
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 there discusses the paper “Drawing to Learn in Science” by Ainsworth, Prain, and Tytler (2011). The authors give five reasons why students should draw in science classes: […]
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 that you might be able to drop? Classically, practice is often pushed into homework assignments or private study time, but a study shows that this […]
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 weren’t prepared, what would you do? Repeat the content they should have read about at home and bore the few students who actually did the […]
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 you: He just published a book to go with the movie! “Ocean drifters – a secret world beneath the waves” by Richard Kirby is a great […]
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 Guest, Lotze and Wallace (2015) on “Youth and the sea: Ocean literacy in Nova Scotia, Canada” makes ocean education seem even more important. In a study […]
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 agreed on what kind of diagrams they use, even sketch the problems using the same blue print. They are pretty proud that they have gone […]
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 one question that comes up all the time is this: Does it really make a difference whether students design an experiment themselves or whether they […]
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 outcomes, help students learn at a deeper level and remember what they learned for longer, and become better team players as professionals. But many people […]
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 different kinds of assessment. For example, if you were to teach remembering factual knowledge, you would probably spend quite some time reminding students of the […]
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 “remember” to “create”. They also introduced a second dimension of types of knowledge, ranging from concrete to abstract. While they break those two dimensions down […]
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 & Krathwohl (2001) very recently. And it has been so worth it! I’ve spent the better part of last year coaxing people at work into […]
“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 clear idea of what conceptual change actually means, let alone how you would go about to change concepts. But I found this article by Watson and […]
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 instruction, for example the Mazur sequence (which is our default sequence) and the Physics Education Research Group at UMass (PERG) sequence. Let’s recall: The Mazur […]
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 process” by Brewer and Lambert (2001). I’ve been thinking about the topic of theory-ladenness of observations quite a bit recently in the context of a […]
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 students to learn. That never sat quite right with me without me really having a solid basis for that feeling, so today I want to share […]
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 feedback on the methods used in most of those lectures, I find myself wondering how we can define a standard or even best practice for […]
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 teaching. And one important aspect is, of course, what the teachers themselves believe to be best practice. There is no one single answer to this, […]
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 are especially on my mind these days because I’ve been exposed to them on the student side for the first time in a very long […]
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 2014 conference in Birmingham. That paper is based on work that I have done with two colleagues – the instructor of a large lecture, and […]
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 are “retreating”. They probably also show you pictures comparing a very old photograph from, say, 1900, with a current photo of the same glacier. What you […]
How do we talk about climate change in a way that will engage young people? I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get slightly tired of talking about climate change. It is a super important topic, one of the most important topics we can talk about, yet it sometimes feels like so much hard work and […]
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 reason is that I enjoy running the experiments. Another is that students generally enjoy running experiments. And the third is that I believe that hands-on […]
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 waiting with anticipation of the new topic, the blackboard is clean and we can dive in and start drawing a picture from scratch. The students […]
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 papers. Then I felt like most of those papers were a lot of hot air, a lot of waffling around, completely disconnected from the real world. […]
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 10-15 minutes into the lecture, then declines sharply, and then starts picking up again at about 40 minutes (so 5 minutes before the end of […]
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 studies show that talking to your neighbor is often more successful in teaching you new things than listening to the lecturer is. In their paper […]
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 my excitement when my colleague sent me an article titled “Serious Fun: Using Toys to Demonstrate Fluid Mechanics Principles” by Saviz and Shakerin (2014). While […]
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 motivation by making the students write about the relevance of the topics you are teaching? In the study “Promoting Interest and Performance in High School Science […]
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 drives learning, what happens when you don’t know the right answer on a test – will it help or hinder future learning? In the paper […]
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 examples of multiple-choice questions at different Bloom-levels were helpful. So today I want to present a different taxonomy, “Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome”, SOLO, this one […]
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 your questions such as to specifically test for example knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis or evaluation; the six educational goals described in Bloom’s taxonomy. How do you […]
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 three classes: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Cognitive learning objectives are about what people know, understand and about their thinking processes dealing with and synthesizing that knowledge. […]
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. And one point of that post struck home, and that point is on contradictory teacher feedback. When I am asked to provide feedback on my […]
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 Educators Association EMSEA14 conference in Gothenburg in October (and you should definitely come – it’s gonna be a great conference!). And while you know I’m a big […]
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 can’t link to it, sorry!). Even though the paper itself dealt with the effectiveness of so-called “Brückenkurse” (i.e. 2-week courses that are offered to incoming […]
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 with you. This one is about the effectiveness of showing demonstrations in the classroom. As you might have noticed following this blog, I’m all for […]
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 an article on the topic “should we ask or should we tell?”. Spoiler alert – the title says it all: “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, […]
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 with hydrostatic pressure” by Loverude, Heron and Kautz (the first two posts here and here). But I am still a bit in shock by what […]
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 something that is routinely used in primary school teaching. While I was aware that developing a correct physical description of such a diver is challenging, […]
