All posts by lablearning

How to Effectively Improve Student Group Work

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improving student group work
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Having your students work in groups is a great way to promote teamwork and problem solving skills. While educating your students is your priority, promoting teamwork is incredibly important as it is a skill that everyone needs in life in order to succeed. The following are a few tips for improving student group work:

  • Emphasize the reason for group work – Before you begin forming your groups, make sure that your students understand why the task is to be done in groups instead of on an individual basis. Students often think that group work is a way to avoid having to teach the class or make grading easier – dispel this notion immediately!
  • Teach students how to work in groups – Students often don’t know how to work in groups. Provide information on how each member needs to take responsibility and how they should relinquish individual priorities or goals for the favor of group goals.
  • Provide reasonable work and clear goals – Obviously, the task should be bigger than a single individual can complete, but you don’t want students to struggle in completing their assignment either. Make sure the goal is clear as well so that the groups know what they are working toward.
  • Provide class time – It can be difficult for students to schedule meetings outside of class. Provide class time for groups to meet.

These are some tips for improving student group work. For additional effective teaching advice, be sure to contact us at Labyrinth Learning today.

How Using Attendance Questions Enhances Learning

Teaching Tips & Strategies, ,
attendance questions for students
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Checking attendance is a regular routine that bores both teachers and students. Going down the list of students in your class while you listen for “here” or “present” doesn’t exactly set a great tone for the rest of your class. So, why not provide attendance questions for students instead?

Ask a question and then go through your class, allowing everyone to answer. Not only are you doing attendance, but you’re giving the students something more interesting to do. This also helps get them thinking and build their confidence, as it gives students who normally don’t speak up in class a chance to say something at the start of the day.

There are a number of questions that you can ask. For example, ask what the pet peeves of your students are. This is a great question as it will most likely elicit a lively discussion. It gives students a chance to get some complaints off their chest. Or ask about an early memory in order to get your students to self reflect. Just be sure to ask questions that won’t take too long to answer. You want to create an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable sharing and speaking up, but you don’t want to take half a class period to do so. Toward the end of a semester, you could ask what their favorite attendance question was.

Use attendance questions for students to enhance learning and contact us at Labyrinth Learning today for additional strategies for teachers.

Preparing for the Future of Higher Education

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Source: morgueFile
Source: morgueFile

Whenever there is an innovation disrupting the world of higher education, it’s easy to try and ignore it and label it as just that – a brief disruption. However, the future of higher education is based off of innovation, which means that keeping up with new innovations is a smart thing to do. The following innovations could mean big things for the future of higher education:

  • Analytics – Analytics tools will allow you to predict the success of students, improve student support services, measure the achievement of learning outcomes and much more.
  • Competency-based education – Competency-based education is based on the idea of awarding credits for mastery instead of traditional credit hours. This gives students a chance to accelerate their time to degree due to the ability to acquire knowledge and skills outside of the classroom through life experience.
  • Personalized learning – Personalization has become a focal point for marketing and retail, and it makes sense that it could be implemented into education. By providing students with individualized learning pathways, you can tailor activities and readings to the needs and interests of students.
  • Open educational resources – Higher education is expensive as it is when not accounting for the need to purchase textbooks every year. Open educational resources on the web make it easier for students to do research and save money, as well.

These are some of the innovations that could change the higher education for the better. Contact us at Labyrinth Learning for additional teaching resources.

What is Your Learning Philosophy?

Teaching Tips & Strategies, , ,
learning philosophy
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As a teacher, odds are pretty good that you have both a specific teaching style and a teaching philosophy. The style of teaching that you employ is most likely something innate, whereas your teaching philosophy has developed over the years with experience and education. However, what about your learning philosophy?

You’ve probably heard about the different learning styles of students. Some students are better visual learners, while others need to read the content in order to learn it – no matter how much attention they pay during lectures. But a learning philosophy is something that should affect your teaching philosophy. It’s your beliefs about learning, after all.

There are a number of things to think about when figuring out your learning philosophy. This includes asking yourself if learning can be taught to be loved by students who dismiss it, if students that have to work harder have less intellectual ability or if they are just less able learners, if students can be taught the same material twice if they didn’t learn it the first time, and if all students can learn the content that you are teaching. By crafting a well thought learning philosophy, you can improve your teaching philosophy and better promote learning in your classroom.

You should think long and hard about your beliefs regarding learning in order to craft your own personal learning philosophy. For additional classroom teaching resources, we invite you to contact us at Labyrinth Learning today.

Effective Group Work Strategies for Your College Students

Teaching Tips & Strategies, ,
effective group work strategies
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Group work is an excellent teaching method to employ as it results in students learning how to work with others and often requires the use of problem solving skills as well. However, one of the issues with group work is that some students will let the others in their group do all the work. The following are a few effective group work strategies to avoid this issue:

  • Work in phases – Split a project into phases. For example, the project idea phase, the project development phase and the preliminary project outcome phase. Require your students to check in after every phase so that you ensure the work is done in a timely manner.
  • Allow choices – Give your students some flexibility when it comes to the topic they choose as long as its relevant to what you are covering. This will create a sense of ownership amongst the group and will make your students more engaged.
  • Require individual work – To ensure every student is working within the group, assign individual work relating to the overall group work. For example, you can require that everyone submits a paper reflecting on the work he or she did within the group.
  • Allow time for getting to know one another – Allow some time for letting your groups get to know each other. Everyone has different styles of communication and work approaches.

Use these effective group strategies when assigning group work and contact us at Labyrinth Learning for additional teaching tips.

How to Effectively Teach Your Course Content

Teaching Tips & Strategies, , ,
ways to teach your course content
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The quality of the course content in the college classroom is obviously important to a student’s success. However, in order to ensure that students get the most out of a class, it’s also essential that the course content is taught well. Here’s a look at a few easy ways to teach your course content more effectively:

  • Make sure the course content is organized in a clear-cut, progressive manner. Ideas should be introduced in an order that demonstrates how they build upon each other. Always start with basic concepts, and build up to more advanced concepts, even if that means back-tracking to a subject that you discussed earlier on.
  • Find ways to have your students think critically about the material you are teaching. This will encourage them to engage and process the material, rather than just memorizing it. Critically thinking about material will help make it a part of their permanent thought processes.
  • Always integrate discussion into your courses. If you only include lectures and quizzes, students will simply learn the material to pass the quiz. If they are required to discuss and talk about the material, however, they will have to learn it on a deeper level. You’ll notice that, as your students adapt to discussions throughout the semester, they’ll become more skilled at learning in this way.

Labyrinth Learning provides the software and course materials you need to enhance your course content in the college classroom. Contact us today to learn more about our range of products.

Helpful Strategies for Using Whole Class Feedback

Teaching Tips & Strategies, ,
whole class feedback
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Most will agree that giving feedback to your students is best done in a one-on-one setting. This allows the student to receive helpful feedback directly and gives him or her a chance to ask you questions. However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for using whole class feedback.

Whole class feedback is when you address the class as a whole and give them feedback as a whole. For example, after handing back graded tests, you can discuss the performance of the class in its entirety. This type of feedback can be quite effective, and it’s a method that is used more than you probably realize. Speaking to each student one-on-one might be more effective, but using whole class feedback has its own benefits. It’s much more efficient to speak to an entire class for ten minutes regarding their performance than it is to speak to each student individually.

When providing whole class feedback, the last thing you should do is lecture your students on the problem they are having. You don’t want to come across as a parent scolding them. Instead, center your feedback around future-focused discussions. Tell your class what they should do next time based on their previous performance. You can even provide goals for the class to reach as a whole.

Don’t shy away from using whole class feedback. For additional advice and information on teaching a classroom of students, be sure to contact us at Labyrinth Learning today.

Learn the Importance of Teaching Students Ethics in Accounting

Teaching Tips & Strategies, ,
teaching students ethics in accounting
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In order to become successful accountants, accounting students must learn a wide array of skills, mathematical concepts, and software. In the midst of imparting all of this technical knowledge, it’s common for instructors and schools to overlook an important part of the field of accounting: ethics. Teaching students ethics in accounting is far less common than it should be. Once you step back and consider its importance, you’ll likely be inspired to spend some time focusing on ethics with your students.

Unethical accounting practices don’t just cost companies a few dollars. Although accountants often assume they are doing little harm by engaging in unethical practices from time to time, the truth is, poor accounting can bring down entire companies. Many businesses have crumbled to the ground following an accounting scandal that started as a simple breach of ethics and quickly grew into something larger.

By showing students examples of instances in which a lack of ethical accounting practices brought down big companies, you are demonstrating to them just how much power they will actually hold in their future positions. You’ll also show them that what starts off as a small breach of ethics can have profound effects that they never predicted; it’s better to adhere to ethical practices from the very beginning.

Labyrinth Learning provides the materials you need for teaching students ethics in accounting. Contact us to learn more about our learning software that benefits both instructors and students.

Teach Students Accounting by Playing Monopoly

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how to teach accounting with Monopoly
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Teaching new subject matter can sometimes be difficult – one way to get information across easier is by using an activity that students are already familiar with. For example, you can actually use the popular board game Monopoly in order to teach students accounting. The following are tips on how to teach accounting with Monopoly:

  • Ask your students to use profit and loss sheets while playing the game and to predict expenses and income as they go. Make it so that a single trip around the board equals a single month on their profit and loss statements.
  • Compare the management of personal and business expenses in real life with playing the game by highlighting the importance of anticipating their expected income and their expenses. Discuss what happens if they don’t plan properly, using examples of losing businesses and homes in the game to mirror real life consequences.
  • Require that receipts be written out whenever money is used within the game, whether it’s for purchases or for paying rent. These receipts will be used for when the students are writing up their profit and loss statements.
  • Ask your students to create a graph that compares their initial predictions with their actual expenses and income to see how things change as the rounds progress. This will help them see whether they became better at making financial predictions or worse.

Use these tips regarding how to teach accounting with Monopoly. Contact us at Labyrinth Learning for additional teaching resources and advice.

How Often Should Professors Lecture in the Classroom?

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how often should teachers lecture in class
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When it comes to teaching a classroom of students, making sure that you have their attention is incredibly important. This means that you should vary your lesson plan a little bit instead of having lectures every single class. However, lectures are still very important, so how often should teachers lecture in class?

Deciding whether you should give your students a lecture is largely dependent on the content you are trying to get across. You don’t want to rely solely on lectures, and you certainly don’t want to repeat what your students are reading and learning on their own – this is simply regurgitating the material and making them more dependent on you instead of their own study habits.

There are a lot of things to consider. For example, maybe you know that the students will have trouble with particular content from past experience, which means a lecture can help make the content more clear to them. Maybe the lecture helps set the foundation and context of the content, thereby giving the students a chance to deal with the content from a place that is expediting their understanding.

When you do decide to give a lecture, make sure that you connect with your students. Ask questions that are intriguing and get your students thinking. Add anecdotes to make the content more entertaining. Don’t just paraphrase from the textbook.

How often should teachers lecture? That depends on the content and your experience. Contact us at Labyrinth Learning for additional teaching tips.