“I believe that I should continuously improve my teaching skills and the content of my courses. This includes keeping the material current with the state of the art in the academic literature and in practice; finding new ways to make the material appeal to students’ curiosity; making efficient use of class time; and introducing new [...]

“What professors do in their classes matters far less than what they ask students to do.”
Talk about a paradigm shift—a change in perspective that can transform thinking. For decades the focus has been on teaching. We have tried to improve learning by becoming better teachers. Research supported those efforts by identifying the components of effective [...]

I recently received a reference to a well-reasoned, well-referenced analysis exploring why “minimal guidance” during instruction does not work. The article appears in a well-respected educational psychology journal which means there’s specialized nomenclature which does not make it particularly easy reading for an outsider. “Minimal guidance” (as opposed to direct instructional guidance) means that learners, [...]

I use an American Heritage dictionary that belonged to my now 97-year-old aunt. She’s descended into dementia and no longer recognizes or communicates sensibly with those of us in this world. But her dictionary is well-used and annotated. An arrow leads from the word “parsimony” to the top margin where she has written “tightwad.” Besides [...]

Have you ever wondered how class session duration impacts students and learning? Is it better for students to meet in hour class sessions three times a week, hour-and-a-half sessions twice a week, or once a week for three hours?
Four marketing professors went in search of an answer. They queried students (across majors but with special [...]

I’m knee deep, some days it feels more like waist deep, in the research on student ratings. I’m still on that chapter on ratings for my book. What a sea of information!
Besides being in deep, I’m also still stuck on the disconnect between what faculty believe and what the research documents. And these aren’t disconnects [...]

Fairly early in my editorship of The Teaching Professor, we published an article that drew some comparisons between students and customers. Never before and not since has a piece generated the response that one did. Education is not a product. Students may pay tuition but that money doesn’t buy grades. With education the customer cannot [...]