LaGuardia Community College is pursuing a sustained, multi-layered strategy to place learning, teaching, and cohesive curriculum at the center of a guided learning pathway. Implemented in both general education and disciplinary majors collegewide, our Learning Matters core competencies offer faculty powerful tools they use to design, enact,…

This paper develops the concept of mentoring through co-teaching as a framework for faculty development in higher education. Mentoring relationships provide an excellent method of improving growth and development of workers within virtually every profession. As a structure for professional development, a mentoring model centered on the concept of…

Current educational practices and cognitive-developmental theories emphasize the importance of active participation in the learning environment, and they suggest that the first, and arguably most important, step to creating a better learning environment is to make learning an active and reciprocal process. Flipped classrooms, in which students…

This article takes the practical inquiry model as an approach to designing a course on social movements that combines self-directed investigation and group discussion as an avenue for deep learning. For the purpose of developing a case study, a guided approach is provided that allows the students to explore theory on their own and make connections…

"Theory? What does this have to do with anything we're doing?" Sound familiar? Students may not always verbalize this, but they often think it, especially in courses where the emphasis is on the development of technical skills and the application of those skills to the building of products. Presenting theory in a way that is relevant and…

This paper introduces creative pedagogical techniques for exploring theory in the undergraduate classroom. Using criminal justice and criminological theories as a primary example, it describes a technique that professors from any theory-driven discipline can use to engage students through popular music, from hip-hop to musical theater in order to…

This instructional paper is intended to provide an alternative approach to developing lecture materials, including handouts and PowerPoint slides, successfully developed over several years. The principal objective is to aid in the bridging of traditional "chalk and talk" lecture approaches with more active learning techniques, especially in more…

Challenged by some of the inherent difficulties in teaching qualitative data analysis, three instructors created an interactive digital learning object entitled "Sleuthing the Layered Text: Investigating Coding." In this paper we assess the effectiveness of that learning object as a tool for teaching qualitative coding. On the face of it, learning…

The article intends to simplify the different aspects of podcasting. The article covers types of podcasts; the pedagogical benefits of podcasting; the connection between theory and podcasting; answers to questions, queries, and apprehensions. Before trying out a new tool, it is important to understand why we do things the way we do. A crucial part…

Web 2.0 and its associated applications and tools have, in many areas, brought about and are continuing to bring about significant shifts in the way people communicate, create, and share information. Pervasive access to broadband Internet connectivity and communication services has created new forms of relationships and patterns of communicating…