BEING TIRED CAN ALTER YOUR TEACHING
Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. Continue reading here.

BREAKING A VICIOUS CYCLE
Working as a school psychologist has allowed Kathy Casale the opportunity to notice something about many of the students who don’t turn in assignments: They are often stuck in a cycle that involves a pernicious interaction of three overlapping cognitive processes: sustained attention, working memory, and anxiety or stress. When students have a problem with one or, more typically, all of these functions, it’s hard for them to produce. She notes that students often get caught in the same repeating cycle: Anxiety and stress reduced working memory capacity, making it harder to pay attention, so they missed work, which in turn increased their anxiety, and so on. Continue reading here.

TEACHING STUDENTS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism can be a real pain. Most teachers have had to deal with it in some form or another, and a whole lot of you still haven’t quite figured out the best way to combat it. Many of us issue stern warnings and threaten serious, soul-crushing consequences. Others also use software to detect plagiarism. While these methods can deter students from plagiarizing and catch them if they do, they operate on the assumption that all plagiarism is devious, that all students who plagiarize know exactly what they’re doing, and our mission is to catch and punish. Now because I don’t believe that assumption is true, I think we could be handling the problem with a lot more finesse. To continue reading or to listen to the podcast, click here.

APPLYING NEW KNOWLEDGE
You will get a range of reactions when you bring up the subject of online group activities. As Gregory Wells notes, "The skills learned by participating in a group project are applicable to nearly any career that a student is currently interested in or will be interested in at a future date. It is rare in today’s global economy that an individual will work independently on a project. Therefore, it is important that opportunities are provided to students to not only learn content, but to apply that content in a practical, near real-world environment." So how can you improve the process to satisfy you and your students? Read more here.

THE PURPOSE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Cathy Davidson has a really interesting post on the HASTAC website. She writes that if we cannot change higher education as rapidly as we would like, we can change our classrooms to reflect our values. At a recent workshop, she asked the participants to answer the following questions, "Maybe you cannot change the world but, for most of us teaching in classrooms,  [what] are ways of making changes in one's own class that can make a difference--to one's students, to one's own role in replicating inequity, and as a model to our institutions seeking to "transform higher education?"  She admits that "what we are advocating is almost the opposite of 'outcomes' thinking; it is structuring empowerment at the input level, designing a syllabus that acknowledges structural inequality by countering it." Read more here. 

STOP CHEATING
Taylor Massey writes "Detecting plagiarism may be an endless battle for instructors, but avoiding it is sometimes easier said than done for students. For many college students, knowing when and how to cite correctly is the biggest challenge. With only so many hours in a semester, writing and citation instructions are not always able to be covered in-class. To give students an idea of where to begin, share these tips with them for easily avoiding plagiarism." Want to see tips offered to help prevent and catch plagiarism, click here.