Maryellen Weimer

Helping Students Learn: Resources, Tools, and Activities for College EducatorsResearch has shown that more and more college students struggle with not only academic coursework, but also identifying how to be a student and learner at a higher education institution. While many students are still able to succeed, colleges and universities are finding that orientation sessions, study skill workshops and study tips and strategies integrated into coursework in all disciplines can set up students for success and improve overall retention. Students need to first learn how to be a learner and with Helping Students Learn: Resources, Tools, and Activities for College Educators as your handy side kick, you can assist them with doing just that and more. This interactive workbook and guide provides engaging content, quizzes, and worksheets for you to use to help students identify how they learn and how they can improve the learning process. Helping Students Learn: Resources, Tools, and Activities for College Educators features activities and curriculum alternatives for faculty, academic advisors, and other educators to help students think critically, improve note-taking abilities, encourage student-run study groups, and develop study skills for daily use. Perfect for novice and seasoned educators, this guide offers strategies to prompt students to confront the myths of multitasking, analyze their current study strategies, develop study skills, engage in note taking that promotes learning, and improve college-level reading skills. In addition, this comprehensive learning guide offers tips for creating study groups, expert advice on how to create a study game plan, and innovative reflection activities to further evaluate how each student learns. Easily copy any of the resources to use as handouts and educational guides in the classroom.Helping Students Learn: Resources, Tools, and Activities for College Educators gives every educator an action plan for guiding students through the early college years, with expert help on how to: Facilitate learning through discussionHelp students create a before- and after-exam learning planEncourage students to review and reflect on their grades and performanceConfront the myth of multitasking-Show students how to take comprehensive and thorough notesProvide actions to avoid that that underscore the value of readingAssist college students with preparing more effectively for examsHelping Students Learn: Resources, Tools, and Activities for College Educators is a resource you can turn to time and time again as you foster learning in the classroom, prepare students for the college experience, and develop adult learners.

Keep students engaged and actively learning with focused, relevant discussion Second only to lecture as the most widely used instructional strategy, there's no better method than classroom discussion to actively engage students with course material. Most faculty are not aware that there is an extensive body of research on the topic from which instructors can learn to facilitate exceptional classroom discussion. Discussion in the College Classroom is a practical guide which utilizes that research, frames it sociologically, and offers advice, along with a wide variety of strategies, to help you spark a relevant conversation and steer it toward specific learning goals. Applicable across a spectrum of academic disciplines both online and on campus, these ideas will help you overcome the practical challenges and norms that can undermine discussion, and foster a new atmosphere of collaborative learning and critical thinking. Higher education faculty are increasingly expected to be more intentional and reflective in their pedagogical practice, and this guide shows you how to meet those expectations, improve student outcomes, and tackle the perennial problem of lagging engagement. Thoroughly grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning, this book gives you concrete guidance on integrating discussion into your courses. You'll learn to: Overcome the challenges that inhibit effective discussionDevelop classroom norms that facilitate discussionKeep discussion focused, relevant, and productiveMaximize the utility of online student discussions The kind of discussion that improves learning rarely arises spontaneously. Like any pedagogical technique, careful planning and smart strategy are the keys to keeping students focused, engaged, and invested in the conversation. Discussion in the College Classroom helps you keep the discussion applicable to the material at hand while serving learning goals.

In this book, Maryellen Weimer provides an essential resource for anyone who is engaged in efforts to improve teaching in higher education. This comprehensive book draws on a wide array of sources to help practitioners build on the foundation laid by existing scholarly work on teaching and learning. Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning reviews previously published work on teaching and learning to better guide those engaged in pedagogical scholarship and to help develop a literature that meets the needs of faculty. Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning includes an analysis of the practitioner literature on teaching and learning in two main categories—the wisdom of scholarship and research scholarship. The first category uses the lens of experience to analyze instructional issues, and the second category employs more objective frames to assess instructional issues. The book explores four experiential approaches to teaching and learning (personal accounts of change, recommended-practices reports, recommended-content reports, and personal narratives and includes an analysis of the three most common research methods (quantitative investigation, qualitative studies, and descriptive research). Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning also includes information about other methods in addition to the main approaches.

Embracing WRITING Embracing Writing responds to the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in a way that enables educators to integrate writing into their courses not just painlessly, but productively, instead of simply increasing their workloads with writing assignments that students dislike. Embracing Writing elucidates the principles of academic writing and shows instructors how to integrate writing with course content, blending them to enhance and deepen the higher education learning process.Scholarly writing is a central part of the academic experience and, when used effectively, can be an outstanding pedagogical tool. The creative approach in Embracing Writing will have you looking at writing in a whole new way. Not only will your students appreciate the honest, nurturing, and fun writing assignments, but your own writing will improve as well. This is not a rulebook for writers, but a guided approach to viewing writing and content as one indivisible whole. Embracing Writing will help you:Engage students in writing assignments that actually help them develop their writing abilityUnderstand what makes good collegiate writing and how it can aid in content discoveryDiscover new pathways for your own writing so writing for publication and the classroom is enjoyable againDevelop a writing pedagogy that doesn’t detract from core course content delivery There often is a disconnect between administrative demands for in-course writing and the inadequate training resources available to faculty members. Because most of us aren’t trained as writers, we need a meaningful way to connect writing to our areas of expertise. Embracing Writing provides that connection.

In this second edition of the classic work Learner-Centered Teaching, Maryellen Weimer—one of the nation’s most highly regarded authorities on effective college teaching—offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic of learner-centered teaching in the college and university classroom. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes the most current examples of practice in action from a variety of disciplines and contains new information on the research support for learner-centered approaches. Weimer also includes a more in-depth discussion of how students’ developmental issues influence the effectiveness of learner-centered teaching. Learner-centered teaching focuses attention on what the student is learning, how the student is learning, the conditions under which the student is learning, whether the student is retaining and applying the learning, and how current learning positions the student for future learning. To help educators accomplish the goals of learner-centered teaching, this important book presents the meaning, practice, and ramifications of the learner-centered approach and how this approach transforms the college classroom environment. Learner-Centered Teaching shows how to tie teaching and curriculum to the process and objectives of learning rather than to the content delivery alone. The book also offers well-researched advice for educators who want to transition to a learner-centered approach in their classrooms and identifies the steps to take to put into place learner-centered policies and practices. Learner-Centered Teaching provides a theoretical foundation for the learner-centered approach and outlines a positive way to improve teaching.

THE LEARNER-CENTERED CURRICULUM “If an institution is to be truly learner-centered, all processes and practices need to be learner-centered, and the curriculum is no exception.”—From the Preface The Learner-Centered Curriculum is for educators and administrators who envision an educational environment that produces students who are creative and autonomous learners. By encouraging an appreciation and adoption of learner-centered practices, educators can transform their curricula to become more focused on the learner. The book presents a framework for curriculum design based on learner-centered principles while at the same time offering technical advice on implementation as well as the strategic use of assessment, technology, and physical spaces to support innovative design. The authors include several examples of existing curricula that illustrate their framework in practice. Throughout the book, they emphasize the need for assessment, both formative and summative, stressing the point that assessment is an effective driver of change. The book includes a wide variety of options both for individual classroom practice and for programmatic assessment. The Learner-Centered Curriculum explores the current technology and tools available to educators that can support learner-centered practices and foster autonomous learning and demonstrates how technology can assist in removing some of the obstacles to achieving a learner-centered design. In addition, the authors explain the importance of physical spaces in relation to learner-centered curricular design and show how to tie renovation to curricular implementation to foster incentive to innovate and provide a physical manifestation of learner-centered principles.

Praise for Effective Instruction for STEM Disciplines "The world of today's learners is a multimode, information-intensive universe of interactive bursts and virtual exchanges, yet our teaching methods retain the outdated characteristics of last generation's study-and-drill approach. New pedagogical methods, detailed and justified in this groundbreaking work, are essential to prepare students to confront the concerns of the future. The book challenges our traditional assumptions and informs the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) community of the latest research on how the brain learns and retains information, how enhanced student engagement with subject material and its context is essential to deep learning, and how to use this knowledge to structure STEM education approaches that work." ?DAVID V. KERNS, JR., Franklin and Mary Olin Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and founding provost, Olin College "Every STEM faculty member should have this book. It provides a handy introduction to the 'why and how' of engaging students in the learning process." ?DAVID VOLTMER, professor emeritus, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and American Society for Engineering Education Fellow "The poor quality of math and science education and the shortage of well-qualified graduates are acknowledged almost daily in the U.S. press. Here the authors provide much-needed insights for educators seeking to improve the quality of STEM education as well as to better prepare students to solve the problems they will confront in our increasingly technology-driven world." ?KEITH BUFFINTON, interim dean of engineering, Bucknell University

An excellent book for faculty who regard teaching as more than a set of techniques. Menges and Weimer focus on connecting teaching with student learning, and they help faculty develop a systematic inquiry into teaching strategies, as well as showing them how to better utilize students assessment in the classroom. ?Larry Braskamp, dean of the College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago

Using vivid examples, classroom strategies, teaching tips and feedback tools, this book demonstrates how to improve teaching skills. Weimer dissects the elements of good teaching - enthusiasm, organization, clarity, among others - and emphasizes that good teaching can come in a variety of guises.