This spring, seven faculty members and two Teaching & Learning Commons staff members piloted a seminar grounded in Daniel T. Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School? Readings and discussions of Willingham’s cognitive science approach to teaching and learning were … Continue reading →

This last week, our new faculty applied Daniel T. Willingham’s cognitive science principles for learning to their current teaching practices. Using concept maps, we covered whiteboards with visual networks that spoke as much to our individual teaching styles as they … Continue reading →

Learning how we learn has been the focus of our new faculty seminar this term. This past week we shifted from thinking about how our students learn to thinking about how we as faculty learn in the somewhat ambiguous and … Continue reading →

Post-spring recess, we are back to exploring Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? with renewed appreciation for our own times of reluctance to be in the classroom. Spring fever hits tenure-track faculty just at the time when grading … Continue reading →

The academic life: alternating rounds of teaching, committees, and scholarship that sometimes skip and trip over one another. For some faculty, the tenure track race is energizing, and for others, exhausting. For lecturers, the teaching load and service expectations can … Continue reading →

People, Daniel T. Willingham writes, “are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.” Discussing this principle in the context of different learning styles and multiple intelligences was our new faculty seminar challenge this past week … Continue reading →

When I was in high school, my chemistry teacher once barked at me to “answer what I mean, not what I say!” Fortunately, this did not extend to qualitative analyses in the afternoon lab sessions, when directions and explanations were … Continue reading →

Tuesday mornings are great morning at Lehman for new faculty: the chance to get together over coffee, cookies, and shared experiences has been further enlivened by our discussions of cognitive science approaches to teaching and learning. Although our group changes … Continue reading →

“Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?”: this was both a chapter title and discussion question in our new faculty seminar this past week. A related question might be how much we distinguish the abstract from … Continue reading →

This week’s second year faculty seminar focused on “Multiplying Factors into Functionality: Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Teaching at Lehman.” We met twice during the week to accommodate different teaching schedules with the benefit of two distinct yet overlapping conversations about what … Continue reading →