Here is a great way to start your semester off right. Make a few resolutions and stick to them. We can always improve our teaching toolkit and David Gooblar shares his ideas in this article. I really like his suggestions and have adopted them for my class. Let me know what you think.

"When given a reading assignment, some students feel they have met their obligation if they have forced their eyes to ‘touch’ (in appropriate sequence) each word on the pages assigned. How can we entice students to read the material we assign, and how do we help them develop strategies for deep comprehension and retention of the material? Are there subtle ways we can prod them to read and help them develop literary skills—without spending our own precious time explicitly teaching ‘reading?" Find out in this article by Dr. Maryellen Weimer.

"I firmly believe that there is a direct correlation between what we expect of our students and what we get. We know that higher expectations generate greater learning. But we also know that higher expectations alone are not sufficient. Greater learning also results from support — support that can be provided, for example, by college-success courses in which common readings are often used." See what else Dr. John Gardner has to say about student success.

Joshua Kim's post on where our focus should be in college classrooms is very insightful. Of the three recommendations he makes, I am happy to say we are actually working on all three. Not as efficiently as we could if we had more resources but nevertheless all three are foci. Kim writes, "Teaching and learning are core to the mission and operation of (almost) every college and university. An erosion of the relative quality in teaching and learning, (as compared to peer schools or emerging competitors), will eventually result in an inability to compete for students, faculty, and funding." Continue reading here.

Ready for the semester to begin? No really, we are starting August 22. Did I just hear a few screams? The first day of the semester always seems to sneak up on us. Sims Wyeth has a good post on how we can increase the impact of our opening remarks. You know, the stuff you say every first day of class. It turns out that students form a really strong opinion of us on that first day and it may not change much over the course of the semester. He writes, "It turns out that our first impressions are not altogether accurate. Scientists call our tendency to leap to judgment the Fundamental Attribution Error. Nevertheless, as speakers, we can take advantage of this human frailty. When we step to the front of the room to deliver a presentation and all eyes are on us, we can take control using the tools at our disposal: physical, vocal, and verbal skills meant to capture the mind of the listener." Continue reading here.

Traditionally we make resolutions around the first of the year. But what if we made resolutions tied to each of our new semesters. Adjustments and corrections based on critical self-reflection are what I am talking about. David Gooblar provides us with a good start and writes, "The real new year in academe— the time for new beginnings and fresh starts — comes now, in August. I’ve had time away from the classroom to recharge my batteries and to forget about teaching for a while. I want to be a better teacher this year than I was last year. August is my month of big plans, of good intentions, of new leaves ready to be turned over." Continue reading here.

When Alice E. Marwick, an assistant professor of media studies at Fordham University, assigned her social-media class to create a post on BuzzFeed, the instructions were simple: Go viral. Several students nailed the assignment, collecting more than 50,000 hits on their listicles and quizzes — BuzzFeed’s bread-and-butter articles. One student devised a quiz on She’s the Man, a quirky romantic comedy from 2006, that surpassed 250,000 page views in mere days, surprising the student and leaving her professor and classmates in awe. Ms. Marwick is one of several professors using BuzzFeed’s free publishing platform in its community section for class assignments. The section is open to anybody who wants to create a post, and instructors are using it to teach a variety of subjects, including marketing, creative writing, human development, and even the work of the ancient Roman poet Ovid. Continue reading here.

Take a look at Antonio Tooley's post if you are asking your students to do a research paper. He notes, "Writing a research paper does not actually take long at all. Your students can do a 10-page paper in one day if they really knuckle down and get going. The most annoying things about this academic assignment are at the beginning and the end of the process: the research and the bibliography. Your students will seldom find all the information they need in one database. When they do have enough information, they then have to wade through hundreds of pages of obfuscating language that academics love to use to get a couple of pages of useful material. Once they have the ample resource materials to back their arguments, students then need to “bag it and tag it” in preparation for the citations and references." Read more here.

When failing lessons need to be abandoned, it's time to implement a sponge. Madeline Hunter originated the term sponge activities to describe "learning activities that soak up precious time that would otherwise be lost." The best sponges are academically rich and provoke laughter. Nicholas Ferroni says that laughter activates dopamine and the learning centers of the brain.So give your students a dopamine snack when they finish the test earlier than expected or when the Wi-Fi goes out. Download the list of sponge learning experiences.