This seems to be the common rule in most classrooms. It is easily explained in a lecture setting. Indeed, everyone must be focused on what the professor is saying. A discussion would only create a ...

All Aboard! Engaging Everyone in Classroom Activities with Liberating Structures When people gather for classes (and meetings), we tend to default to structures with centralized control and minimal ...

At some point in their career, every teacher will find themselves having a difficult discussion with their students. My first took place not long after I began teaching. It involved one of my students ...

Academic instructors, hired for their content expertise, are rarely trained in skills like classroom facilitation or community-building. But successful collaborative learning requires a degree of ...

Why Are Class Discussions Challenging? There are a variety of reasons that class discussions are challenging. It’s not necessarily just students being “lazy”. There could be a lot of real issues and ...

When Shira Hoffer arrived at Harvard in 2021, she was full of hope, not just about academics or independence, but about connection. As a graduate of a pluralistic Jewish day school, she had grown up ...

When I first started teaching, my attitude toward students who remained silent in discussion classes could be summed up with the words of Bernard Hopkins, the fistic sage of Philadelphia: “Bernard ...