Podcast #32: Teaching Freshmen with Bonni Stachowiak

Bonni Stachowiak teaches courses in business, marketing, leadership, and human resources at Vanguard University of Southern California where many of her students are freshmen. In this episode she talks with us about the issues and opportunities involved with teaching first year students. Bonni also hosts her own podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and shares some stories from behind the scenes.

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Show Notes

0:00 ⏯ Intro

0:38 ⏯ Welcoming Bonni.

2:29 ⏯ 31 flavors. Bridging disciplines and looking for the stories.

10:02 ⏯ What is a first-year student? Diversity and teaching critical thinking.

12:54 ⏯ Learning about who your students are. Using the learning management system.

16:36 ⏯ Learning as a teacher and being vulnerable. Teacher authenticity.

18:12 ⏯ The power of retrieval practice. “Forgetting is the friend of learning.”

Robert Bjork on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Michael Hyatt, the virtual mentor Design your ideal week

21:48 ⏯ Normalizing help-seeking behavior.

25:00 ⏯ Scaffolding student assignments: a research paper. Teaching about plagiarism.

Getting and visualizing data with Statista Managing references with Zotero and RefMe

30:33 ⏯ Not assuming students know what they need to know. What could I have done differently?

33:32 ⏯ Memory palaces.

37:29 ⏯ Teaching our students metacognition–and using it ourselves.

39:31 ⏯ Note-taking and file-sharing tools for teachers. nvAlt, Evernote, PlanBook. File management.

46:01 ⏯ Teaching differently than others. “This can’t be Powerpoint?!” Active learning is hard, because learning is hard.

50:15 ⏯ Teaching fails. Podcasting fails. Interviewing Ken Bain.

53:43 ⏯ Portrait of a master educator.

55:23 ⏯ Closing credits.

Want more? Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching has an excellent guide to teaching first year students as well as a two part podcast on the subject (part 1, part 2)