My blog entries aren’t generating as many responses as I had hoped. Some of you are sending me personal emails … thanks. Be welcome to share your responses with all of us reading.
That being said, a blog comment posted on April 8 did generate a couple of interesting responses (I know, I need to respond [...]

It’s Saturday morning, not yet 8:30 a.m. Eighty-three elementary and secondary education teachers are arriving for an eight hour class—part of a two-year masters degree program. Conversations buzz around the large auditorium style room. People meet, greet and move around the room. The background music is energetic. Pictures flash on the large screen at the [...]

Frequently now, candidates for faculty positions are being asked to provide teaching philosophy statements. Bob Eierman reports that that request appears in 40 percent of the ads for chemistry positions that he looked at in a professional publication advertising positions in that field. Another 20 percent of the time the request is for a statement [...]

In the May issue of The Teaching Professor, there’s a follow-up article that further explores the issue of control in the classroom and how much there needs to be to create the kind of environment learning demands. My colleague and good friend Mitch Zimmer came down pretty strongly on the side of control, citing as [...]

We give students grades for two reasons. First, they fulfill our professional responsibility to certify mastery of material. That is, they measure how much and how well students have learned. But we also use grades to promote learning. Writing a paper or taking an exam forces students to confront content and in the process they [...]

Correct the answer. Fix it for the student and the rest of the class. Make it right.
Ask how the student arrived at that conclusion. “Explain your thinking.” “Take us through the steps that led you to that conclusion.”
Defer to the rest of the class. “How many of you agree?”
Solicit a collection of answers before [...]

“Students DO NOT COME TO SCHOOL TO LEARN … we come because a university education is deemed socially and economically necessary … We have been brain washed into a game, whereby we memorize vast amounts of material, regurgitate it onto paper in a crowded room, and then forget about it. The academic environment has trained [...]

I’m reading other blogs now that I’ve started writing this one. My favorite so far is one on knitting written by an expert knitter. It’s funny, very informative, and some days even a bit inspirational. But overall I have to confess that I’m mostly unimpressed, especially with blogs devoted to higher education topics … maybe [...]

The article referenced below suggests that we aren’t being as insightful about class participation as we should be. We don’t think carefully about why we’re using this strategy—as in what goals we hope it accomplishes. But more than that, we don’t look at the results our methods produce. Example: we cold call students (that’s the [...]