[social-bio]   By Carolyn Hoessler Reading articles and books is a regular part of my academic life, however I haven’t been reading them forever so at some point I must have learned how. The strategies such as skimming, selecting specific sections, quick annotation, and others improve my effectiveness. But it is not these skills alone, rather it is my ability to decide whether to skim or read in depth, to choose which paragraph to read next, and to identify what information to annotate. In short, my ability to think about how I’m thinking matters, not the mindless enactment of routinized skills. When our students learn strategies, it can be frustrating…

[social-bio] Recently, I did some reading on using debates as a course format. I had been familiar with using debates as an instructional strategy, but not as the actual format for an entire course. I was able to find a few examples of where this had been previously done, including the Genome 475 course at the University of Washington: For this course, debates were used for all of the units. Each unit was broken into three parts A introductory lecture or discussion The debate An open discussion of issues raised in the debate Other important pieces of information from this example were that Class attendance is required and part of…