It wouldn’t be the end of the year without a few top 10 lists. As we prepare to put 2016 in the rearview mirror, we’re offering up our own list, which goes to 11.

Throughout 2016, we published more than 200 articles. The articles covered a wide range of teaching and learning topics, including diversity and inclusion, critical thinking, peer feedback, assignment strategies, course design, flipped learning, online discussions, and grading policies.

In this post, we reveal the 11 articles that most resonated with our readers. Each article’s ranking is based on a combination of factors, including e-newsletter open and click rates, social shares, reader comments, web traffic, reprint requests, and other reader engagement metrics.

11. Why Are We So Slow to Change the Way We Teach?
Many aspects of teaching—lecture, course design, assignments, and grading—have changed little over the years. The question is, “Why?”

10. Backward Design, Forward Progress
Backward course design forces us, as faculty, to make tough decisions about what content is really needed for our students to achieve their learning goals.

9. The Ugly Consequences of Complaining about ‘Students These Days’
What we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that’s when it starts getting dangerous, because it affects how we teach.

8. Three Focusing Activities to Engage Students in the First Five Minutes of Class
You can use a focusing activity to introduce a new idea or to set the stage for what’s to come during class. They can be high-tech, low-tech, or no tech.

7. Student Engagement Strategies for the Online Learning Environment
Our faculty development unit gathered data from students about how engaged they felt in their online courses. Their comments helped inform our teaching.

6. A Memo to Students about Studying for Finals
The end of the semester is rarely pretty. You’re tired. I’m tired. We both have too much to do, and you’re feeling the pressure to perform well on finals.

5. Six Things Faculty Can Do to Promote Student Engagement
Last week’s post encouraged us to reconsider what student engagement means. Today we explore some of the things teachers can do to better promote it.

4. A Practical Approach for Increasing Students’ In-Class Questions
Why don’t students ask questions in class? Is it shyness, lack of preparedness, or something else? Perhaps they simple don’t know where to begin.

3. Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom
The needs of our transgender students are too often overlooked. This article outlines strategies to support gender diversity in your inclusive classroom.

2. Ready to Flip: Three Ways to Hold Students Accountable for Pre-Class Work
One of the biggest questions about the flipped classroom model is how to get students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared.

1. A Memo to My Students Re: College and the Real World
What happens in college and what you’ll be doing in your career aren’t the same, but they aren’t as different as many of you seem to think.

By Lolita Paff, PhD

Early in my career, I focused most of my efforts on teaching content. That is, after all, what most of us are hired to do, right? With experience and greater understanding of how learning works, my attention shifted toward metacognition. I began investing lots of time and energy reading and identifying ways to help students grow as learners while they learned the content.

It was an improvement, but I had nagging suspicions that important contributors to learning were still missing from my teaching repertoire. I considered the ways teachers influence student behaviors (generally lots of carrots and sticks). What about motivation? What makes students want to learn and want to become better learners? My research identified three overlooked aspects of learning that teachers should consider promoting through their instructional practices: student curiosity (zest), an academic growth mindset and persistence (grit), and an understanding that true long-lasting learning takes effort (sweat).

Fueling zest
Zest is my word for intellectual curiosity, student interest, and enthusiasm. When we’re interested in what we’re learning, we pay closer attention. We think more carefully, make more connections, and dig below the surface. When we’re curious, we are motivated to work harder and longer. Zest isn’t about entertaining. It’s about leveraging the mind’s natural tendency to attend to and expend energy on that which engages and stimulates.

Addressing metacognition without considering students’ curiosity and motivation is like heading out on a long bike trip to an unfamiliar destination. Simply having the roadmap doesn’t ensure the desire to ride or the will to finish. Zest entices us to hop on the saddle; it’s a call to adventure. Teachers incorporate zest when we

• Connect to students’ interests and make work relevant. Tap into questions, topics, and issues that matter to students. Ask students to identify topics or questions they care about. Use their questions as a means of learning content.
• Make it real. Study real-world events, analyze historical cases, incorporate web-based writing, and provide opportunities for service learning.
• Bring passion to the table. Teacher enthusiasm covers a multitude of sins and fosters student interest. Enthusiasm can be contagious.

Promoting grit
Terms like grit, tenacity, perseverance, and persistence describe students who approach learning with a long-term focus. These students endure; they view challenges as temporary setbacks. Students with a fixed mindset focus on performance measures like grades, not learning. Mistakes are perceived as failures, not a necessary part of learning. Resilient learners persist in assignments, courses, and programs like cyclists who dust themselves off and get back on the trail after a mishap. Gritty learners view academic difficulties and confusion as speed bumps, not roadblocks to learning. Teachers promote grit when we

• Identify appropriate challenges. If goals are too easy or too difficult, student motivation is decreased. Too easy suggests the value or worth is low. Likewise, students may not put forth sufficient effort if a task seems “impossible.”
• Provide low-stakes practice. Learning requires practice. Multiple, low-stakes opportunities, with timely feedback, promote grit.
• Offer specific feedback. To be most effective, feedback needs to be specific, and timely. It should identify strengths, weaknesses, and recommendations for future action.

Encouraging sweat
Completing a cycling trip requires stamina and good planning. It’s common for novice riders to underestimate the challenges, overestimate their ability, and fail to plan or plan poorly. Inexperienced learners face these issues too. Learning, like cycling, is hard. It takes time, things go wrong, and you’re not going far without putting forth effort. Fortunately, teachers can help students work smarter, harder and longer when we

• Incorporate reflection. Reflective questions can be part of class time or incorporated into assignments. Why was this question asked? How is X related to Y? What is the most challenging topic in the chapter? How does this material connect to what you learned before? When students make these connections, learning takes on a long-term perspective.
• Provide study tips. Provide or develop with students a list of strategies that promote deep learning. Suggest a timeline for study based on “spaced learning” principles. Or better, ask students to submit a timeline or project plan for studying, writing a paper, or completing a project. Develop practice tests or ask students to write questions to use as part of a “testing to learn” strategy.
• Mind cognitive load. Complex assignment instructions, confusing website navigation, and disorganized course materials increase unproductive cognitive load. Cognitive load should focus energy on the subject, not on the periphery.

 Lifelong learning is more about the ride than the destination. Integrating zest influences what students think and motivates them to start the journey. Strategies attending to grit and sweat influence what students do and the efforts put forth by helping them advance along the paths of learning, now and in the future.

Watch this preview of Developing a Growth Mindset, a three-pack of 20-Minute Mentors led by Lolita Paff. Learn More »

Recommended Reading:

Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, MC., Norman, M.K. (2010). How Learning Works Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Benassi, V.A., Overson, C.E. & Hakala, C.M. (Eds.). Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum. Available at the Society for the Teaching of Psychology web site: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php

Brown, P.C., Roediger, H. L, & McDaniel, M.A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carey, B. (2015). How We Learn and Why It Happens. NY: Random House.

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. NY: Ballentine.

Dr. Lolita Paff is an associate professor of business and economics at Penn State Berks. She also serves on the advisory board of the Teaching Professor Conference.

The most recent issue of Peer Review (Winter/Spring 2016; published by AACU) highlights the powerful impact ‘transparency’ can have on learning for all students. One aspect of transparency is making obvious the intellectual practices involved in completing and evaluating a learning task. But making these processes visible for students is more easily said than done; we are experts in our fields for the very reasons that our thinking and evaluating are automatic and subconscious. It’s hard to describe exactly what we do intellectually when we synthesize or integrate, critique, or create. Similarly, it’s difficult to articulate the differences between an assignment we score as an A and one to which we give a B. Thus, a challenge in achieving transparency is developing a deep awareness of our own processes. Only then can we explicitly teach those thinking processes. In my own case, thinking about thinking (aka metacognition) was a new pedagogical consideration and it took time to learn this new set of skills in the context of teaching biology. So I was tickled pink one day last September when, at my new institution, I was able to problem-solve on my feet. I was teaching a new-to-me set of skills (writing outside of science) in a new-to-me format (discussion) to a population of students with whom I had no prior experience and in a class I’d never taught before.

In one of our early class meetings I asked my first-year students to identify ways that the reading homework connected to ideas from previous chapters of our text. When I was greeted with mostly weak attempts and puzzled looks, I thought fast. What is it that my brain does when I’m integrating information? My first answer was that I just “see” the connections and parallels. How do I explain that to students? Fortunately, previous reflections served me well and a strategy came to me in the moment. I suggested we start by identifying the major ideas, topics, and characters from previous chapters. As we made the lists on the whiteboard, I felt a wave of relief as I personally started to see more connections among the material—connections I hadn’t identified before arriving in class. This gave me confidence that I had stumbled in the right direction.

Another aspect of transparency is to overtly model what it is you want the students to do for themselves. So, I circled the three times that Darwin appeared in our list and as a class we identified the pages in the relevant chapters where the great man was discussed: first about his belief that humans, like other organisms, could be understood biologically; second about his influence on Rokitansky and the Vienna School of Medicine; and third about his influence on Freud. During the ensuing discussion in which we explored those connections, I silently circled the additional items on the whiteboard that had relevance (Modernism, Klimt, emotion) and noted that as I did so, a few students were using the book’s index to find more textual passages. To be even more transparent about our process, when conversation started to lag, I asked the students to identify what it was we’d done to integrate ideas across chapters.

Knowing that watching isn’t the same as doing I wanted to give students a chance to practice. I asked them to form small groups, identify three clearly related terms on our list, and explore the links using the same strategy of examining the relevant sections in the text. Because we’d done concept mapping in a previous class session, I asked them to track their discussion with an abbreviated version of such a map. For our class-wide debrief, each group reported on the connections they identified. These two steps, working in small groups and then reporting to the larger group, provided a direct experience of practice, as well as examples of how others had approached the task. It also provided feedback from peers (and me as I commented during reports). I created another low-stakes opportunity to practice by asking students to bring to our next class meeting a concept map linking two ideas from our list on the whiteboard with one from the next reading assignment and to provide page numbers that supported the links.

Looking back, I could have pushed the transparency a bit further by modeling how to evaluate the quality of what we were producing. If I had thought about how to help students integrate ideas ahead of time rather than coming up with it on the fly, I would have done two examples (one of lesser quality) of how content connected across chapters and then engaged us in a discussion about significance, novelty, and intellectual depth of understanding. This approach would have clarified my expectations and it would have given students practice evaluating their ideas.

Moreover, this last approach makes transparent a mindset important to becoming independent and creative thinkers: it’s okay to take intellectual risks and go down a path that winds around without getting any place exciting. I could have talked about how, in fact, the risk-taking plus evaluation is part of the intentionality students need not just for my class and not just for college, but for their life and work beyond graduation. This is a learning goal that I often don’t even acknowledge to myself much less make transparent for my students.

Good thing I’m teaching the class again this fall!

Dr. Amy B. Mulnix is the director of the Faculty Center at Franklin and Marshall College. Her current scholarship involves synthesizing literature on professional development and the learning sciences.