The first way to encourage engagement is to make sure that the content of the meeting wouldn’t be more effectively shared via an email or recording. 16 more tips follow.
How to help students pay attention in an online meeting
9 Practices for Protecting and Rebuilding Your Energy
Planning for reality doesn't diminish joy should better times come, but it does make living in this moment easier.
We’re not made for constant crisis–and neither are our students
Today's post is drawn from a lecture I share with my Sociology of Disaster students. I'm grateful for how they've contributed to my critical view of resilience over the years. Humans are amazingly resilient. We can face hard, acute crises and find solutions quickly. We are great at bouncing back and even pretty good at... Continue Reading →
What do students need on a learn-from-home day? Extreme Cold Edition
If your campus is online tomorrow, remember that students learning from home due to extreme cold or snow are doing it under conditions that might be very different than when they are learning from home due to quarantine or isolation. Their kids are also at home—possibly also learning from home. Their kids may be required... Continue Reading →
Collegeland’s “Zoomversity” just released!
"If you can learn when it's so hard, you're going to soar when it's easier. When this big, hard thing is over, you're going to be so strong at doing these things well."
Student voices: Webcams are a barrier to access.
This post is a lightly edited comment from a previous blog post in which I recommended that faculty find ways of engaging students that don't require the use of cameras. This is especially important for online classes that aren't advertised as synchronous and requiring cameras and for any class that is scheduled as in-person but... Continue Reading →
How to help your students rest
"In a culture on a quest for more that often overvalues productivity, we may have a greater obligation to teach students to rest than to work hard."
How to help students be curious.
We are increasingly aware of the role of K-12 education in “killing curiosity”, and we should be aware of how college can do that, too. Curiosity matters for its own sake--and it is also a strong predictor of learning, even more than focus! Here are some low-effort ways you can encourage more curiosity in your... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Confronting Religious Violence
Reviewing books is the best--free books in exchange for a little writing? Yes please! Here's my latest, a review of Confronting Religious Violence: A Counternarrative, an edited collection that arose out of a symposium about Not in God's Name by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the co-editors of the newer volume. It appears at Reading... Continue Reading →
“Crosses and Crossroads” available now to shed light on the Christian Right’s attack on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
Black pastors are leaving or considering leaving the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the US and one founded in defense of slavery. At its 2017 annual meeting, white resistance to a resolution condemning the alt-right was initially denied consideration--until support for the move began to stream in from overt white nationalists. Caught... Continue Reading →
Rebecca Barrett-Fox 