Commentary Category
The Mindful PhD: Difficult Discussions
Dec. 13, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Several recent campus conversations have focused on facilitating difficult discussions with students in and out of class. I’ve long taught multicultural American literature and women’s studies courses, so I appreciate how hard it is to effectively navigate these moments. As I prepare my syllabus for next semester, I’ve been...
The Mindful PhD: Inspiration, Creativity, & New Ideas
Dec. 4, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director In “The Science of Inspiration” (2013), Eric Ravenscraft highlights the neuroscientific view of inspiration, epiphanies, and “‘a-ha’ moments”: “When you make a new connection between two ideas, it’s not just a metaphor. Your brain is literally restructuring itself to accommodate new processes…. [T]he more ‘plastic’ your brain is, the...
The Mindful PhD: Labyrinths & Learning
Nov. 20, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I’ve been reading everything I find about mindfulness, but I’m eager for more evidence-based work on its effects on learning in the college classroom. As my previous posts indicate, recent years have seen a lot of scientific research (especially in neuroscience and psychology) pointing to the psychological and physiological...
SoTL Spotlight: Reflections from a SoTL Project
Nov. 20, 2013—by Andrew Greer, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow Learning happens (or doesn’t), and the processes often remain hidden. Teachers tend to modify their teaching with trial and error, and base these modifications on assumptions about the problems with student learning. However, instead of being guided by hunches, scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) researchers strive to...
“Inviting Genius”: Students as Producers in African American Studies
Nov. 18, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director The CFT’s theme this year, “Students as Producers,” has given me the opportunity to talk with some talented and thoughtful colleagues across campus. On October 24, I brought together three of them to have a conversation on teaching about “Producing, Performing, & Creating Learning across the Humanities: Models of...
The Mindful PhD: Reading Like Bruce Lee
Nov. 14, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director I teach literature. My students read a lot, and I want them to read well—closely, carefully, attentively. I’ve always heard that the best readers were read to when they were young and then read voraciously when they were growing up. This makes great sense to me, but it also...
SoTL Spotlight: A Great Conference in Banff
Nov. 11, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director Nancy is the author of a variety of SoTL articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor of two books on signature pedagogies and co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the official journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), with the Center for Teaching as its...
The Mindful PhD: How It Works, IV
Nov. 6, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director There are few silver bullets in teaching and learning, but a handful of strategies are so grounded in evidence that I sometimes feel like shouting from rooftops. One is metacognition.* Another is how students view their own intelligence. Carol Dweck describes it as having either a “fixed mindset” (believing...
Speaking into Humanity: French Students as Producers
Nov. 4, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director The CFT’s theme this year, “Students as Producers,” has given me the opportunity to talk with some talented and thoughtful colleagues across campus. On October 24, I brought together three of them to have a conversation on teaching about “Producing, Performing, & Creating Learning across the Humanities: Models of...
The Mindful PhD: How It Works, III
Oct. 31, 2013—by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director A man riding a horse approaches a man standing by the side of the road. The bystander asks where the rider is going, and the rider responds, “‘I don’t know. Ask the horse’” (Tan, 2012, p. 104). Chade-Meng Tan tells this story to illustrate the notion of emotional regulation,...