At the end of each month, I do a brief overview of the videos posted to my You Tube Channel. Here’s the run down for May:
Creating Book Snaps
This month, I learned about book snaps and gave them a go. There are lots of possibilities for how you can incorporate them into your instruction.
Reading Without Walls
While Reading Without Walls was a challenge for the month of April, you can use it year round. I’m planning to use it in the upcoming academic year with my online masters classes.
I’m really into this concept right now. Basically, it explores how we can design courses that give students options for how they engage with the content. Students can take a predetermined path or modify it based on their goals and background knowledge.
That should give you plenty of ideas to play around with this month! Which ones are you planning to try?
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Starting today, and coming at you every Thursday, I’m going to be highlighting specific issues as it relates to teaching and mentoring at the doctoral and assistant professor level. This will include things like specific teaching techniques/issues that are aimed at teaching doctoral classes, what it means to be a mentor, and tips for writing and publishing in academia.
Today I want to discuss what it means to get organized when it comes to your writing. If you haven’t seen it yet, I have a brief video on the topic:
The important thing about being successful in your writing, regardless of what your life/job looks like, is getting organized before you start. I don’t mean writing outlines. I mean thinking through what you will be writing and when you will be doing it.
I’m talking about getting yourself scheduled.
When I was a doctoral student, my adviser showed me her calendar for a week. The calendar had things in it that you would expect such as when she had to teach classes and meetings. But she had also blocked out time for her writing. What she explained to me has stuck with me ever since. It basically goes like this….
If you’re teaching class, lets say, from 9:00-11:50 on Mondays, and someone asks you if you can meet with them at 10:00 on a Monday, what would you say? You would decline because you are teaching class. You cannot walk out of class to meet someone, and everyone gets this. Now, let’s say you have a meeting scheduled on Tuesday from 1:00-2:30, and someone wants to meet with you at 1:30. What would you say? You would say no because you already have a meeting scheduled. Everyone gets this.
But, suppose you have decided that on Wednesday you will write from 9:00-12:00 and someone wants to meet with you at 10:00. What would you say? Here’s where most people slip up and say yes. They cancel or modify their writing plan instead of looking for another time to meet.
What happens then is we start to see our writing time as something that we can cut from our schedules. However, as my adviser explained, we have to treat it as a meeting with ourselves. We wouldn’t cancel a meeting with others so why would we cancel our writing time? Our writing time is no less important even if we are working by ourselves. We have to value it and safeguard it in order to make sure our work gets done (AND we get tenure AND we keep our jobs).
That’s not to say you should never cancel or adjust your writing block. True emergencies happen. Sometimes important meetings with others do need to take precedent. In my experience, that happens (at best) once a semester but generally I’m seeing it happen once a year.
Yep. On average, I have to cancel my writing time or shorten it up once a year. Everything else seems to work itself out.
Of course this begs the question….How much should you be writing in one week? And we”ll cover that next time.
For now, work on looking at your schedule. Find chunks of time that work for you. Block it out. Get it done. And remember, even a bad writing day is better than none at all. I know, easier said that done!
At the end of each month, I do a brief overview of the videos posted to my You Tube Channel. Here’s the run down for August:
I have two main themes this month in my videos. First, I have continued to develop videos related to finding a job in academia – aimed at doctoral students primarily. If you have questions or things you would like to see addressed you should let me know. Otherwise, this thread is winding down.
Be Prepared
The Academic Job Talk
After the Interview
Second, I have focused on a series of videos that discuss academic writing tips.
What Does Revise & Resubmit Mean?
How to Handle Revisions
How to Address Revisions
This is a bit different from the previous video. I discuss how to keep yourself organized and communicate what you did with the editors and reviewers.
At the end of each month, I do a brief overview of the videos posted to my You Tube Channel. Here’s the run down for June:
This month, I have focused on developing the Get a Job! aspect of my channel. Get a Job! is targeted at people who are new to the academic job market and want to learn the ins and outs. I recently participated in a webinar on this topic. People submitted questions in advance of the webinar that we attempted to address. I have since taken that list of questions and started responding to them via video.
Near the end of each month, I’m going to be posting about new videos that have been added to my YouTube channel. I’ve been working to build up the channel and make it more consistent and relevant. The idea is that it adds another layer to this blog and gives you information you won’t find on here – or I’ve got it boiled down for you to the key ideas.
There are currently three strands. The first strand focuses on videos related to teaching in higher education. We’ll start there.
From the Syllabus
The Class Blog: Looks at how I set up and ran a blog in one of my undergraduate courses:
Tweeting in Class: How I have my students utilize twitter during face to face sessions:
Tweeting After Class: How I have my students utilize twitter between each meeting:
Extended Twitter Chat: How I had students engage in a week long twitter chat between meeting sessions. My first attempt and how it went:
Extended Twitter Chat (Revised): Examines the changes I made in response to the first twitter chat
The Healthy Professor
The Healthy Professor is my new second strand. Awhile back, I ran a pretty successful yoga blog. On that blog, one of my favorite things to do was find recipes and try them out. I miss that. Plus, it’s important to live and eat in a healthy manner (I think). So I’m bringing that mindset to this blog with this new video series.
Roasted Tomatoes, Eggs, & Quinoa: My pilot. 🙂 See original recipe here.
This is my third series. I wanted to do a video series that was geared towards grad students and (perhaps) assistant professors. The point of this series is to give a variety of suggestions for how to address issues in writing ranging from actually writing to motivation and organization.
Teaching Academia 