I’m in the middle of a new book on learner-centered teaching, Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment, by Terry Doyle. The book offers lots of good advice on overcoming student resistance to learner-centered approaches, those that make students more responsible for their own learning. One suggestion (that comes off more like a theme, at [...]

A recent issue of an excellent pedagogical periodical, called Pedagogy, devotes itself to an exploration of professional development within English. One article describes experiences in a teaching circles program. Here’s a great quote that raises some important issues related to the challenges of talking teaching with colleagues.
“It took considerable self-conscious humility—not any academic’s strong suit—to [...]

“I have come to realize that it is not so much what students know as what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do.”
This quote is from an account of one teacher’s journey to instructional growth and maturity. It’s just full of wise insights. You’ll [...]

There’s a short article in a recent issue of College Teaching on a topic that I don’t see written about very often. I suspect we don’t think about it as often as we should either. It’s the matter of bias in grading.
What sort of “extraneous influences” might consciously or unconsciously influence the grades we assign? [...]

A recently published study in the Journal of Higher Education offers some encouraging evidence about the role of teaching ability in the hiring process. More than 90 percent of the survey respondents rated candidates’ teaching ability as important or very important. Despite that stated importance, a bit less than 17 percent ask for a teaching [...]

I was with a group of faculty yesterday. We were bemoaning how strongly grade-oriented most students are. Some of us thought faculty were too grade-oriented as well. One participant shared a small but unique way he tried to emphasize learning over grades.
“When I meet with my advisees, I never ask them what grade they got [...]

Over the past several days I’ve been re-reading John Bean’s book, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Now, there’s a book I really wish I’d written. At this point it’s a classic, widely referenced, and one of the few books I regularly hear faculty recommending [...]

I do a lot of presentations in August and September. Often my contributions are part of a larger set of activities that launch the new academic year. Frequently they include presentations during which faculty from that institution share instructional experiences, strategies, ideas, insights, and opinions. Once again this year, I have been impressed by the [...]