EdSurge Podcast

Since the pandemic, more professors are reporting they’re having trouble connecting with their students. That’s according to Bonni Stachowiak, dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California and host of the weekly podcast Teaching in Higher Ed. She shares other trends she’s seeing in teaching, and ways instructors are overcoming them.

It’s important to nurture philosophical thinking in kids throughout school and college. So argues a philosophy professor who wrote a book that highlights the natural tendencies of kids to think like philosophers. When big, important questions arise, he says, parents and educators should treat kids like conversational equals.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

For decades, proponents of open access scholarship have worked to make the research in scholarly journals freely readable to all. Will this moment of AI chatbots accelerate the effort?

In 2015, a video went viral showing a white school resource officer violently flipping over a Black student in her desk and dragging her across the room before arresting her. It sparked a lawsuit against a vague South Carolina law that brings the criminal justice system into schools for minor offenses, and a nationwide discussion about systemic racism in school policing.

A growing number of educators are wondering whether the grading system is hindering students rather than helping them learn. A new book explores alternative methods of marking papers in ways that encourage students to continually revise their work rather than quibble over which letter grade they deserve.

Sometime early in elementary school, kids are put on one of two paths: regular or gifted. Where did this idea come from? The answer goes back more than a 100 years, to a once-famous scholar named Lewis Terman. And it turns out his legacy, and the future of gifted programs, are still very much under debate.

These days teachers need some basic training in a number of fields, including mental health and social work, to be effective in the classroom, argues Stephanie Malia Krauss, author of a new book about the importance of teaching holistically in this time of pandemic and social unrest.

With every new generation of students there’s an effort to understand what’s different about them, and what motivates them as they enter society and the workforce. For Gen Z, a key factor is their skills in organizing on social media and interest in working across traditional partisan divides on issues like gun control, environmental protection and racial justice, argues Timothy Law Snyder, president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who calls them the “solidarity generation.”

Two longtime professors hoped the pandemic would reset the small liberal arts colleges where they taught. So they wrote a book-length manifesto laying out a vision for making the colleges more accessible — and true engines of social mobility. Three years into the pandemic, they reflect on how that’s going.