The Pygmalion Effect In the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal decided to test how experimenters’ unconscious expectations shaped the results of their studies. He took a group of average rats and labeled half of them bright and half of them dull before he assigned them to his experimental psychology students at Harvard. In the students’ experiments, the […]

Time to Check In It’s hard to believe that classes began a month ago, but somehow midterm is already on the horizon, and the deadline to drop a class is coming up in two weeks (on October 12). By this point in the semester, both you and your students need some feedback on their learning. […]

Writing to Learn If you don’t already teach with writing, the suggestion may invoke your deepest fears of avalanches of paper, or hours spent writing comments that no one reads; but in fact we can harness the remarkable power of writing to promote learning without sentencing ourselves to perpetual grading jail. Peter Elbow (1994) insisted […]

Transparent Teaching How often have you read through a batch of student work, wondering how they managed to miss the point of an assignment you’d explained so clearly? Because we’ve all acquired expert blind spots in our respective fields, what seems so obvious to us is often a mystery to our students, who may spend […]