Tag Archives: recommended reading

Currently reading about how to successfully organize team work in student groups

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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 “Turning student groups into effective teams” (see also featured image). That latter article is really one of the most useful articles I have come across over many years of reading, including a great FAQ section, and templates.

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“Liberating structures: Engaging everyone to build a good life together” (Lipmanowicz et al., 2015) — go read it and try them!

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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!

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Recommended reading: “Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity” (Tanner, 2013)

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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. Do all courses always need to connect to sustainability? In my opinion, everything is connected to sustainability, and even if you don’t want to explicitly address it in every course and all the time, there are so many things you can do to use your teaching on any content and skills for sustainability.

One article that I find super helpful is “Structure matters: twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity.” (Tanner, 2013). It is not about sustainability, but it is contributing to it anyway by giving super simple teaching tricks that help teachers to pay attention that all students are invited to participate and to personally connect to the topic. In a nutshell (but go read the original article, since it not only provides a checklist but also explains why each of the strategies is important and why they work): Continue reading →

Currently reading: “Teaching with rubrics: the good, the bad, and the ugly” (Andrade, 2005)

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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 of the article:

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Currently reading: “Disarming Racial Microaggressions: Microintervention Strategies for Targets, White Allies, and Bystanders” (Sue et al., 2019)

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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 the aspects that I want to take from the article to bring into a workshop I’m teaching next month (so I am reading this through a very specific lens for my own context). I definitely recommend to check out the original article to look at great examples of strategies to intervene depending on the objective (if nothing else, browse table 1)!

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Recommended reading: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022)

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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…

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“Doughnut Rounds” (after Fleiszer et al., 1997)

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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 understanding (for example due to superficial reading…) and to general engagement with the topic.

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Currently reading: Relationship-rich education (Felten & Lambert, 2020)

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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.

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“Systems conveners in complex landscapes” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014)

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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 framework is that there are many different, but legitimate, roles, that can also — again, legitimately — change over time. The description of one specific role, the “broker”, really spoke to me when I first read the book: Someone who is involved in many different CoPs and facilitates information flow between them. That’s kinda what I have always been doing because that’s what I find most interesting (much more interesting than really digging deep into one topic), without thinking about that being an important contribution to all those CoPs. And now I read another Wenger work which made me realize that while I was probably a broker for many years, maybe now I am on my way of becoming a “systems convener” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014): “They are dreamers but they are also schemers, with a solid dose of strategic thinking and tactical acuity.”

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