This is the time of year when we can smell the fear in the air. It is the end of the semester and that means that finals are just around the corner. Our students anxiety levels are raised and some of them begin to panic. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maryellen Weimer posted a letter to students about finals back in December 2016. It is still a great piece and the relevance echoes throughout higher education. I also found it very useful in teaching College Success Skills (CSSK 1023) as we spend a good amount of time on helping students figure out how they learn best. Weimer begins where we also begin in CSSK--start with a plan. Very often students jump into finals prep with no game plan and that is surely a recipe for disaster. One of my favorite parts of the post is this gem: "Believe in yourself. Your brain is plenty big enough to handle any question I might toss at you. You’ve just got to get the information stored in a place where you can retrieve it. Build connections between the new material and what you already know. Short-term memory is like a sponge—once it gets full, it drips. If you truly understand something, it’s much less likely to leak out." I strongly encourage you to share this letter with your students. We have sent it to the student who are participating in study groups and have received some positive feedback from them as well (letting your students know it is peer-endorsed may get them to read it). You might also remind them that the Academic Learning Center provides assistance for all students and the Long Night Against Procrastination is occurring on May 2 from 4:00 until 10:00 pm in the Magnolia Building on the Mid City Campus.

GOOD HABITS FOR INSTRUCTORS
Julie DuNeen has written an interesting piece about the habits of successful teachers. She writes, "If you ask a student what makes him or her successful in school, you probably won’t hear about some fantastic new book or video lecture series. Most likely you will hear something like, it was all Mr. Jones. He just never gave up on me. What students take away from a successful education usually centers on a personal connection with a teacher who instilled passion and inspiration for their subject. It’s difficult to measure success, and in the world of academia, educators are continually re-evaluating how to quantify learning. But the first and most important question to ask is: Are teachers reaching their students? Here are 25 things successful educators do differently.

IS COURSE REDESIGN FOR YOU

At the height of the buzz around MOOCs and flipped classrooms three years ago, Bridget Ford worried that administrators might try to replace her introductory history course with a batch of videos. She agreed that something should change: Drop-outs and failures were high in the 200-person class—at about 13 percent. But the assistant professor of history at California State University at East Bay wanted something less drastic than giving up on live lectures entirely. Looking through a collection of teaching portfolios by her colleagues helped reassure her that she could redesign her course while preserving what worked about the classroom experience. Plenty of colleagues on other campuses were wrestling with the same question, she saw in the portfolios, and they were finding ways that tried new approaches without throwing out the old completely—call it turning the class on its side rather than making a full flip. For her, that meant reducing the amount of lecture time and spending part of class sessions on team-based projects. “It was helpful to me to see that my field wasn’t an outlier in arriving at a middle ground,” she says. Continue reading here.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR REST
As we approach the final exam period, reminding your students about good study habits that lead to success is important. Many students are still under the impression that cramming or "pulling an all-nighter" is the way to learn. Here is an article that focuses on how rest can actually make you perform better on assessments. It begins, "Sleep is critical for mind and body health. Without it, the effects can be severe. But what if you suffer from insomnia? Neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre provides seven healthy tips for a better night’s sleep."

TO DO LIST FOR SUMMER
Finals week is upon us and soon we will be preparing for another exciting commencement day (May 22). But there is still work to be done. We all need to submit our grades by Monday (May 18) and while we have prepared and given our finals, there is grading so this weekend may be very busy for many of us. I thought I would continue the end-of-semester theme for you. While many of you are transitioning your online content to the new LMS Canvas, some of you may be too busy for that now. The good news is that Blackboard does not go away until June but then, that is it. Dr. Steve Volk of Oberlin College provides us with an interesting post that is filled with great end-of-semester ideas. One that I particularly like concerns looking back at the semester and judging our progress. Dr. Steve Krause at Eastern Michigan University has a nice post also. One of my favorite quotes from his post is this gem, "When I was growing up, my mother—who, like me, was a “contingent” professor—would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more that sympathy dissipated: “If you hate grading papers so much,” I’d say, “there’s an easy solution for that.” My mother, not to be trifled with when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate), would snap: “It’s an English class. I can’t not assign papers.” Be at peace and send me your thoughts.

BEST USE OF YOUR CLOUD
So that brings us to another topic that is top-of-mind at this time. How and where are we going to store all of our electronic data and files? Hopefully you are using one of the Teaching+Learning Center USBs that I have been distributing but that is mainly for things you use frequently. The cloud is the obvious place that you want to save things, especially long-term. EdTech, the epublication that focuses on technology used by higher education, has an informative article about using the full potential of the cloud. Take a look here for more information.

ACADEMIC ADVISING TOPIC
A report recently released by the William T. Grant Foundation sheds some light on how we can best advise our students about alternative paths to the baccalaureate. This new research indicates progress on the access front, but many unexpected obstacles (lack of counseling, confusing choices, chaotic schedules) that contribute to students failing to complete.  While 37 percent of on-time high school graduates enrolled in a community college with the intention of getting a bachelor's degree, nearly half drop out within eight years often taking on debt and gaining no wage advantage from the experience. Just 33 percent of community college students earn an associate degree in eight years, the report found. Read more here.