Learning Made Easier

Analyzing is when you take several things you’ve learned about a single topic and tie them together. Join Adam and Dinur as we talk about different ways to analyze what you’re learning!

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Unpacking is getting down to the details of what you need to know about a topic. It’s sort of the opposite of summarizing. Join Dinur and Adam as we talk about how to dig down into the details! 

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Questioning is the art of finding the weak or missing points of any topic and knowing why they’re weak or missing. We do this by asking questions and finding out which ones don’t have answers. Join Dinur and Adam as we talk about which questions work best!

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Discussion boards can seem boring if the questions aren’t formulated well. Ideally, you want questions that tap into learning at different levels – from memorization to evaluation. So we suggest using Bloom’s taxonomy to create your discussion board questions. Join Adam and Dinur as we go over this process!

This is also our final (for now) COVID-19 episode. Please email us at [email protected] if you have suggestions for more COVID-19 education-related topics!

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“Summarize” means to say the same thing in fewer words. Many students don’t know how to do this. In this first episode of our Critical Thinking series, Adam and Dinur go over how summarizing works.

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Paragraph from our shared chapter: 

In the spring of 2020, the academic world was shaken to its foundations by the rapid changes demanded by the appearance of COVID-19. Historically, higher education has changed slowly and incrementally, usually due to external pressure such as new laws or regulations. Higher education’s institutions are structured as bureaucracies, and the known inability of bureaucracies to make rapid change, we argue, is in many cases exacerbated by the culture and mindset bureaucracies create for the actors that work within them – what we here call bureaucraticity. We will show that this culture and mindset rest on the idea that bureaucracy creates safety, predictability, and stability, and should be protected and preserved. Bureaucraticity, or the culture of the bureaucratic mindset, created many additional roadblocks to the quick pivot needed when COVID-19 became a reality.

The summary:

In spring 2020, COVID-19 caused rapid changes to academia. Change in higher education is historically slow, and only as a reaction to outside pressures. The bureaucratic culture, or bureaucraticity, is one of the main reasons higher education has trouble with rapid change. Bureaucraticity rests on bureaucracy creating stability. It created problems when quick change was required due to COVID-19.

Paragraph from Dinur’s book:

Student-athletes receive explicit and implicit messages about the importance of school from their families, friends, coaches, teammates and various academic personnel on campus. Messages from family, coaches, and advisors explicitly and overwhelmingly preach academic effort leading to success, while implicit messages from coaches may include implied focus on football and basketball at power-five schools, but also include the threat of sport-related punishment for under-performance in the classroom regardless of school. These punishments include early practices or extra running before practice, assigning extra study-hall hours until grades are raised, reducing playing time for missed practices, or potentially either awarding or removing a scholarship, depending on both athletic and academic achievement.

The summary:

Student-athletes are told to prioritize school from people they care about. They emphasize academic effort as a path to success. However, coaches at some schools imply the sport is more important, and many coaches threaten sport-related punishment due to low grades, including extra practice, extra study hall, or removal of scholarships.

Rapport in an online class doesn’t look anything like it would in an in-person class. So you need to find other ways to connect, instead of trying to recreate something that can’t be recreated. Join Dinur and Adam as we talk about how to do this.

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With all that’s currently happening in the United States, teachers – and students – have to be prepared to have difficult conversations with one another. How can we have productive conversations about learning and action, instead of shouting matches in class? Join Dinur and Adam as we discuss this issue.

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In our fourth COVID-19 episode, we offered suggestions for how to keep your students engaged now that classes are taught online. Catlin Tucker offers eight additional methods to keep students engaged in online classes, and in this episode, Adam and Dinur go over her additional methods and how we’ve used or will use them. 

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An emergency comes up. You need to miss class for some time, and one of your professors won’t reply to the email you sent out. What do you do? Join Adam and Dinur as we talk about how to handle this situation.

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Worried about having to move to online teaching in the fall? In this episode, Adam and Dinur run down a list of some best practices that have shown up, both in research and anecdotally, for making online classes work when you have never (or rarely) taught a class online!

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