
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.

In March, Rachel Forsyth and I were invited to give the keynote at Stockholm University’s teacher conference 2026. The conference theme was “teaching for democracy and sustainability”, and about a year before the conference, we ambitiously announced we would be talking about “Teaching for tomorrow — trust, agency and sustainability in higher education”. Now the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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)

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 […]

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 […]

This week, we got super exciting news: Kjersti‘s and my proposal to the active learning call by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Competence (HK-dir) got funded (perfect timing, since our article on co-creating learning on oceanography was also published this week!)! Below I’m sharing the translation of an interview that Kjersti gave to […]

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’ve been a fan of working with rubrics for a long time, but somehow I don’t seem to have blogged about it. So here we go! Rubrics are basically tables of learning outcomes. The rows give different criteria that are to be assessed, and then performance at (typically three) different levels is described. Below, I’ll […]

Participation in shared production of artefacts is a great way to learn in a community, because putting things on paper (or, as we will see later, on online slides or physical whiteboards) requires a clearer articulation of the topic of discussion, and a level of commitment to a shared meaning (Wenger, 1998). We give two […]

I’ve been talking about the importance of leaving room for topics that students are really interested in for a long time. Today, I want to tell you about my first experience with this: Back in 2012, in my first year teaching the “introduction to oceanography course”, a student came up to me after the first […]

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, […]

I just love giving students choice: It instantly makes them more motivated and engaged! Especially when it comes to big and important tasks like assessments. One thing that I have great experience with is letting students choose the format of a cruise or lab report. After all, if writing a classical lab report isn’t a […]

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 […]

I’m still inspired by Cathy’s work on “co-creation”, and an episode of “Lecture Breakers” (I think the first one on student engagement techniques where they talked about letting students choose the format of the artefact they do for assessment purposes; but I binge-listened, and honestly, they are all inspiring!). And something that Sam recently said […]

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 […]