Monthly Thoughts…

Selecting Course Readings

2025-05-22 by Pat Reid

While some instructors do not have the freedom to select course readings for their class, many still do. Selecting course readings is not an easy process, so I thought I would outline the process Maybee and I wrote up in our article (Reid & Maybee, 2021)… Read more

Some Advice From Other Instructors

2025-04-29 by Pat Reid

This month I asked a couple of instructor-focused social media groups for advice for new instructors. I loosely grouped these into Taking Care of Yourself, Your Syllabus, Teaching the Class, and Other. Here is the compiled list (duplicates removed): Taking Care of Yourself Your Syllabus Teaching the Class Other… Read more

Levels of Cognitive Feedback

2025-04-03 by Pat Reid

A few months ago, I wrote about the direction of feedback – Feed up, back, and forward (available here). In addition to direction, when we write feedback we should consider what Hattie & Timperley (2007) refer to as the cognitive level of the feedback. They describe 4 types of cognitive levels: Task (FT), Process (FP), … Read more

Video Length

2025-02-28 by Pat Reid

Last month I watched the IDEAS Seminar on “Beyond the Classroom: Creating Engaging Educational Videos” (Yurchenkov, 2025). If you have read some of my previous blog posts you may noticed several about video lessons. However, several points jumped out at me that I thought I would share specifically about the length of videos (note the … Read more

Feed Backward, Forward and Up

2025-01-24 by Pat Reid

Feedback: “Nice job. I enjoyed reading this. A-“ I took a cohort program for my master’s and had the same instructor for 4 or 5 courses. Each assignment was an essay. On every essay I got exactly the same feedback – absolutely no comments on grammar or specific ideas, but rather the generic “Nice job. … Read more

Lesson plan sequencing

2024-12-30 by Pat Reid

ITEEA, Gagné, Cafarella, and others provide a procedural flow for a unit/lesson. The differences are primarily on focus – the ITEEA  6E model is focused on project- and case-based unit design and so the language of their model is based on student activity. Of course, the instructor is still designing the unit, based on how … Read more