Nuance Over Nonsense
Grades or Outcomes? What’s your preference?
Are you a grades educator or an outcomes educator? I discovered that I had changed from a grades educator to an outcome educator over time. While cleaning out several old work boxes, I found some files from twenty years ago. I came across a folder that I labeled...
Molly’s New Metacognitive Learning Metrics
Have you ever set students up for failure? Well, if you’ve ever advised students to study X number of hours for every hour of class time, then you have set them up for failure. No worries. You didn’t intend to harm them. But by encouraging students to use time to...
Introducing The Learner’s Formula
Professionals in all fields rely upon processes to do consistently high-quality work. We need processes most when our jobs require us to handle high volumes of work or when the work is complex. Take painters for example. Professional painters use the "W Method" to...
Help Students Differentiate Thinking Skills with Metacognitive Tools
Students will begin the 2022–2023 academic year in our post-quarantine world with optimism and excitement to join their peers on campus. But many students will soon struggle as the reality of college work sets in. Their academic success depends on their ability to...
Help Students Succeed: The Three Cs of Academic Work
Far too many students needlessly struggle their way through college. They study to the best of their abilities, but their grades simply don’t improve. Why does this happen? Students who can’t find their groove in college have never learned the basics about academic...
2021 LSAC National Conference
On May 19, 2021, I was honored to provide two workshops for the Learning Specialists Association of Canada's annual national conference. Having been the conference Keynote speaker in 2015, it was great connecting with many of my colleagues from the north and beyond!...
Instruction Amplified
Teaching shouldn't be so hard! On a basic level, the teaching and learning enterprise is built upon two conditional assurances. Teachers want to know that if they teach students, then students will work to learn the material. Students want to know that if they do the...
Why Bad Thinking Happens
There are two types of academic challenges students face in college: Type I and Type II. Type I problems are challenges of effort. In these situations, students aren't very studious. They don’t show up for class. They don’t study. And they don't read. In most cases,...
Unequal Competence: The Gap Between Passing and Learning
My recent discoveries suggest that "good students" -- those with decent skills and who work hard -- enjoy consistent academic success in settings with two distinct academic conditions. Fortunately for them, many courses have these conditions. This post shares the two...
Transforming Academic Divers into Academic Strivers: Building Academic Endurance
Going to college is no trivial matter, but succeeding in college is an entirely different challenge. Why does college make some students but break others? This article shares an effective strategy you can use to transform students’ struggles into successes. When...
Academic Divers, Strivers and Thrivers: Metacognitive Learner Profiles
-Click image to enlarge-In the current environment of hyper-segmentation, it can seem impossible for instructors and learning center professionals to know what college students need to succeed. We seem infatuated with sub-dividing students into increasingly smaller...
3 Essential Learning Skills that Guarantee Academic and Career Success
Have you ever wondered which learning skills are indispensable for student success? I guess our answer to this question hinges upon how we define student success. When I think of student success, I imagine students whose skills cut across academic disciplines. To me,...
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