March | 2022 | Teacher Tricks

Thank you for coming to my session today at Miami Dade’s Faculty Retreat. As I noted in the presentation, this page is your outsourced memory for the session. Feel free to take any of these ideas and remix them and share them as you see fit. If you would like to contact me, please feel free to email me: James May.

80% of you would like to have a Canvas Preview – What to Know Before Moving to Canvas

44% of you wanted Online and Mixed Mode Teacher Tricks

40% of you wanted Ideas for Improving Student Retention

Retention & Engagement

A lot of the literature on student retention focuses on institutional changes that can help to improve retention. Constructs like:

Academic Advising
Social Connectedness
Business Procedures
Connect to Financial Resources
Connect to Student Support Servies
Learning Experiences

Things teachers can change

Make a Great First Impression
Monitor Students Closely
Use Data to Track & Inform Decisions
Communicate Early & Often
Give Clear Feedback & Utilize Rubrics
Build Teams & Community
Offer Flexible Scheduling

Suggestions – Get ahead of the ThinSlice

Behavioral economics is in the classroom and beyond! The concept of thin-slicing, which was popularized in Malcome Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005) (Links to an external site.), refers to the ability of individuals to make rapid, yet reliable judgments or decisions based on relatively modest amounts of information; such an ability, Gladwell argues, testifies to the substantial amount of unconscious, instinctive knowledge that many people have acquired over the course of their lives and professional careers.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom; teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Feldman, R. S., & Prohaska, T. (1979). The student as Pygmalion: Effect of student expectation on the teacher.Journal Of Educational Psychology, 71(4), 485-493.
Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 64(3), 431-441.

To get ahead of the Thinslice, consider using Screencastify or Flipgrid to develop introduction and orientation videos/screencasts for your students. Not into video, at the very least provide images of you to humanize yourself to your students. The better they connect with you, the better they will perform for you.

Things To Know about Canvas

Get a test account

The To-Do List & Notification Settings – The Keys to Success

No matter how you design your Canvas Courses, your students will likely enter and move through your courses via the To Do List. As a result, this should always be something you consider while designing in Canvas.

Your students may be talking to you and you might not even know it. Don’t forget to set your Notification Preferences and check your submission comments.