How to teach college #22: After morning rounds

Two and a half years ago I shared my own habit of taking a few minutes each morning to skim the abstracts of newly published studies in my content area and grab any that were relevant and interesting. I'm back now with another incredibly simple tactic that can amp up anyone's classroom effectiveness.

Are you teaching a concept for the zillionth time, and it feels stale? Is it associated with a single researcher or scholar? Do a quick search to see if they've been a podcast guest, and then listen to the episode. Not only will you get their own explanation of the work at a digested level that's very student-friendly, but they may also throw in some good fun stories about how they did the work behind the idea, and those will bring your students back at those moments they start to glaze over. After all, we all know the best way to invite high quality listening is to tell a story. (If you haven't read that, it's time. Stop putting it off.)

So next week, I'm teaching my conflict class about Julia Minson's work in conversational receptiveness, and what have we here? The following week, I'm introducing my health communication class to Jack Dovidio's work on nonverbals and aversive racism, and looky what I found! And while we're at it, do you want the "tell a story" study I linked explained aloud? I got you.

It helps me a great deal to listen to the researcher or theorist explain my course content in spoken style, because I know for a fact I borrow their word choice and phrasing. I just don't get the same grist if I only read their written explanations. Now, I don't mean anyone should treat podcasts as a replacement for reading the underlying scholarly work, because it's important to understand it deeply enough to field questions and push students to novel applications. But if I can't make it accessible in their first encounter, we never get to that point, so the podcasts and the oral explanations are a big boost.