I’ve been wanting to write a long blog post on the idea of the “digital native” for a while now. This short post will have to do for now… A new study from the Open University that “explodes” the “myth of the ‘digital native’” has two big problems. One is that all the participants are [...]
Every year my teaching center hosts an orientation for new teaching assistants. Back in the day, we had a plenary session or two at this event, but we’ve learned that putting the math and English TAs in the same room really isn’t that helpful. Instead, we run the entire orientation in small sessions, each of [...]
I’m at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, today and tomorrow thanks to the good people at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). I’m giving a talk here in about an hour titled “Class Time Reconsidered: Motivating Student Participation and Engagement.” My goal is to share some frameworks and strategies for engaging [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the “imagine” step in the four step model David Sibbet describes in his new book, Visual Meetings. I noted that Sibbet’s first step, which involves having meeting participants make visible their expectations and goals for a meeting, reminded me of the idea of a “private universe,” the [...]
Okay, so I didn’t finish David Sibbet’s new book Visual Meetings over winter break. But I did read a couple of chapters! I thought I’d share a few thoughts on what I read, particularly an interesting group cognition model Sibbet describes in Chapter 1. (See my earlier post for a few observations from Sibbet’s introduction.) [...]
More from the the 30th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio back in November… A Fractal Thinker Ponders Bringing Faculty Development to Students: What If? – Ed Nuhfer, California State University-Channel Islands I was really looking forward to this session with Ed Nuhfer, and I wasn’t disappointed. I know Ed, [...]
More from the the 30th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Ohio… The Truth about Learning Styles (Linda Nilson, Clemson University) When I asked D. Christopher Brooks what he thought about learning styles prior to Linda Nilson’s keynote on this topic, he pointed me to Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham’s recent [...]
One of the sessions I attended last week at the 2010 POD Network Conference in St. Louis was offered by Matt Kaplan and Deborah Meizlish of the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT). The session was titled “Using Metacognition to Foster Students’ Disciplinary Thinking and Writing Skills.” Some thoughts on [...]
I was recently asked (by Stephanie Chasteen) to describe my approach to helping faculty innovate in their teaching. While I’ve been asked this question in various ways in the past, rarely have I been asked to respond in writing, as I was this time. I took a little time to compose my answer, and the [...]
Back in June (which feels so very long ago), I did a series of posts on applications to teaching from Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin. I’ve got at least one more post about Roam’s book in me, and this one deals with the differences between novices and experts. In Chapter 5 of [...]
Welcome to my home page. I’m Derek Bruff, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I’m also acting director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics. The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Vanderbilt University.
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