too little student interaction either with the instructor or with other students
During the pandemic this was something I was worried about. A lot of students benefit from having peers help them as well as the professor and it is harder to build a relationship with your peers if you are not physically in the same room. Not impossible but much less likely.
They may be well remembered, but they cannot be repeated, or if they are, it will be a different experience or a different audience
I get this feeling that every time I teach a lesson it is different in a few ways than the way I taught it before.
supporting the kind of learning environment that you believe will be most effective
Light, enthusiastic, curious, safe with a twinge of humour.
do want or need feedback on how they are doing with their learning. ‘Do I really understand this?’ or ‘How am I doing compared to other learners?’
I try to emphasize that grading is not the be all, end all. It is just a tool to determine if the course content is understood (it's also a good evaluation of myself and how well I'm able to impart the knowledge and skills asked for)
Adjunct or sessional instructors, teaching assistants, librarians, faculty development workshops, and technical support staff, including instructional designers, media producers and IT technical support are all forms of teaching assistance
I owe a lot of my successes to having great support myself, from home to those I work alongside.
Where students feel the teacher or instructor is not present, both learner performance and completion rates decline
I remember being in a class where it felt like the teacher really did not care. It dramatically impacted my learning and motivation.
critical thinking, but to state clearly what this would look like in the context of the particular course or content area, in ways that are clear to students.
It's true that we hear the term "critical thinking" but seldomly explicitly define it or define it simply
Why do we require students to know facts, ideas, principles, evidence, and descriptions of processes or procedures?
Yes! Always include the "why"? I should be able to explain why I include anything from material to assessments in my course.
the first and perhaps most important step is for teachers and instructors to know their students,
Every group of students I get is different from the last, they have different needs and challenges so I try to chat with them either through class discussion or more casually to get a sense for where they are at.
heuristic
Learned a new word: enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.
A second premise is that knowledge is not fixed or static once learned, but continually develops
This is SUPER important. You can learn a fact (via science for example) but afterwards, learning the surrounding information like how we discovered it and then applying and talking about it deepens that understanding.