Wherever you locate yourself on the political spectrum, there’s no avoiding the fact that the current semester is beginning against a national backdrop of stress, conflict, and challenge. Our students are feeling these stresses, naturally, and so are we—both outside and inside the classroom. With all this in mind, on Thursday, August 31, CNDLS hosted… Read more »
Posts By: David Ebenbach
Reflection: Turning Information into Meaning
Is the semester already starting to feel like a blur? Even early on, ideas and conversations accumulate quickly, and students (and faculty, too) may be doing all they can to keep up. Students may not be taking the time—they may not have the time—to integrate everything they’re learning or to connect it to other areas… Read more »
Deja Vu All Over Again: Breaking the Ice on a New Semester
The cyclical nature of the academic experience can produce an odd sense of deja vu; you spend a whole semester building an engaged and productive classroom community, and then the course ends, which means that at the beginning of the next semester you have to start that process all over again with a new group…. Read more »
Teaching after Charlottesville: Resources and a Workshop
As the school year begins, many of us—students, faculty, and staff—are still affected by and preoccupied with the events surrounding the white supremacist march in Charlottesville earlier this month. For faculty and staff, this means we need to be thinking about how to approach our students, and how to take on, in the spaces we… Read more »
Implicit Bias: What’s in Your Classroom?
Psychological and sociological research have made it clear that everybody is prone to biases. What’s more, some of these biases we carry and deploy unreflectively, often unwittingly, or in other words implicitly. What this means for us is that all teachers carry unexamined, unintentional judgments and expectations with us into the classroom—a mental picture of… Read more »
Ending the Semester: Looking Back, Looking Forward
If a semester is a marathon, then a school year is back-to-back marathons; it’s understandable if, by this point, many of us are focused only on finishing. But these last weeks can be meaningful in their own right. If you can find the energy, this moment is a great opportunity to look around. You might… Read more »
Get Backward on Technology
These days there’s always some new technology, something new and shiny, to bring into the classroom. But “new” and “shiny” are not, in themselves, good reasons to adopt a new technology in your classroom; nor are they good reasons to reject it. Whether we’re talking about a virtual reality headset, a collaborative online game, the… Read more »
Putting Well-Being in the Lesson Plan
When students enter the classroom, they show up in their full complexity, with many layers and intersecting identities. In other words, they don’t just bring their intellects, which of course are not separable from all the other things that characterize people—background experience, hopes, concerns, physical and mental health (and/or health issues), and lots more. This… Read more »
Ignatian Pedagogy: The Meaning of Reflection
How can we make learning mean something? How can we go beyond conveying information to helping students grow in understanding and wisdom? At a Jesuit institution like Georgetown, we might turn for answers to the rich tradition of Ignatian Pedagogy. This contemplative approach to teaching is rooted in the sixteenth-century spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius—and… Read more »
Really, Though: How’s the Semester Going?
The typical greeting on campus these days involves the question “How’s the semester going?” There are common answers, too, maybe involving how fast time is going by, or how much the grading is piling up—but, beyond those habitual observations, it can be hard to be sure just exactly how class is going. Most students at… Read more »
