Putting Current Events in the Classroom

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As instructional designers, we spend weeks or months working with subject matter experts and programs to ensure that courses have everything students need. We work on alignment and learning outcomes, and we carefully construct modules so that the content is current, robust, and presented in the clearest way possible. What happens though, when a portion of the course content is affected by current events? For example: What if the person or company, featured in a case study, suddenly faces serious allegations while the course is still live? Or worse yet, the content itself could become irrelevant or unusable. In these cases, students need to understand what is happening, and why. Adding Current Events to the Curriculum If you find yourself…

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Fostering Growth Mindset in Grad Students

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“People with a fixed mindset believe that their traits are set in stone – they have a certain amount of intelligence and nothing will change that. The opposite of this is the growth mindset – people see their qualities as things that they can develop through effort and practice” (Gallagher, 2014, their emphasis). According to Carol Dweck, Growth Mindset is something anyone can have. Realizing the importance and weight of this mindset practice, many K-12 educators are actively incorporating mindset lessons into their curriculum. But what about graduate students? Because they’re more advanced, it’s easy to assume that graduate students have already mastered the growth mindset. But that may not be true. Graduate students are not immune to having a…

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