constructive alignment – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Reading more about constructive alignment (Wickström, 2015, on “Dekonstruerad länkning: En kritisk läsning av Constructive Alignment inom svensk högskolepedagogik och pedagogisk utveckling”)

mglessmer — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 09:06:32 +0000

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 […]

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Currently reading Loughlin et al. (2025) on “Reclaiming constructive alignment”

mglessmer — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:36:22 +0000

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 […]

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Currently reading “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025)

mglessmer — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 08:11:58 +0000

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! We teach about constructive alignment in all our courses. […]

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Recently published: “Supporting sensemaking by introducing a connecting thread throughout a course” (Daae, Semper, Glessmer; 2024)

mglessmer — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:27:22 +0000

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 […]

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The story of Robert and Susan (Biggs, 1999)

mglessmer — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 15:09:19 +0000

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 […]

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Flipping the classroom

mglessmer — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 10:15:24 +0000

How can we make sure students actually prepare for the next session? This post is a work-in-progress – I am working on flipping my first ever class, and this is a collection of my thoughts on the matter which I thought might be interesting to others, too. But I will definitely come back to the […]

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Constructive alignment

mglessmer — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 11:30:40 +0000

Or: Think first about what you want students to be able to do, then about what they need to learn in order to do it. One term that I’ve noticed I am referring to in blog posts without ever having actually talked about what I mean by it is “constructive alignment”. It is the most fundamental idea underlying my […]

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How to plan a course from scratch

mglessmer — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:20:20 +0000

Where do I even start??? A very helpful concept, which is completely contrary to how most people approach course planning, is “backward design”. Instead of looking at all the cool experiments, the awesome, fun materials, the best case studies, we first look at the learning outcomes we want to achieve with our course. From those […]

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On purpose and aim of hands-on experiments.

mglessmer — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 05:44:52 +0000

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 […]

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Concept maps

mglessmer — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 06:29:41 +0000

Drawing concept maps at the beginning, the middle and the end of the course. Using concept maps in teaching is something that I first tried last year in both the GEOF130 and CMM31 courses. The idea is that coming in, students typically don’t have a very good overview over the topics and concepts that are […]

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