Here’s an idea of that could benefit every discipline. A couple of psychology faculty members surveyed job ads posted by their professional association to identify which courses new faculty were most often asked to teach. They identified four courses, listed in 45 percent of the ads. Their point: graduate schools ought to be sure that [...]

The September 4 blog offers criteria for assessing the contributions of individual students when they work on group projects.
My mentor and colleague Gene Melander responded with a number of salient points, including this one: “A frequent rationale provided for making collaborative learning assignments references a need to prepare students to function as members of teams [...]

“Truly awful teaching in higher education is most often revealed by a sheer lack of interest in and compassion for students and student learning. It repeatedly displays the classic symptom of making a subject seem more demanding than it actually is. Some people may get pleasure from this kind of masquerade. They are teaching very [...]

Here’s a guest blog written by Keith Starcher who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University.
–Maryellen Weimer The fall semester has begun. I can tell by looking at the opposite side of my desk where fingerprints of all sizes decorate the faux wood stain. I keep wiping them off and they keep reappearing. Dealing with students can [...]

I’m currently writing and thinking about ways to change faculty thinking about student evaluation. We need a whole new paradigm—one that gets teachers focused on improving student learning and pursues better teaching as a byproduct of that first endeavor. Teaching will still improve but the focus on learning changes some other important dynamics. It means [...]

Writing about his maturation as a teacher, Kent Sandstrom (in one of my all time favorite articles) describes how he began his teaching career with such ambitious and lofty goals. In the tradition of Dewey he aspired to educate citizens for lives of social activity and responsibility.
He wanted to help develop the intellectual [...]

Need a good list of behaviors that students can assess when they work with each other in small groups? Diane Baker, in an excellent article on peer assessment in small groups (I’ll be excerpting more from it in an upcoming issue of the newsletter), reviewed a wide collection of instruments and found that although the [...]