Our students seem to be masters at multitasking—they regularly do more than one thing at once, or break from one task to work on another and then move on to a third. Even those of us not so adept at managing more than one task at once can “walk and chew gum,” which makes us all multitaskers to some degree. But our students combine so many disparate tasks: biology book open on their knees, they text a friend while listening to rap in the background. Many of them tell us they can’t study when everything is quiet.
Archive for May, 2009
Putting it on the Line
Posted Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerRon Berk has a nice “Tribute to Teaching” in the most recent issue of College Teaching. He uses the term “professosaurus” to describe senior faculty—I think he qualifies having recently retired after 37 years of teaching, most of it at Johns Hopkins University.
He wants to find a metaphor that captures what makes teaching more a [...]
Write This Summer
Posted Thursday, May 21st, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerIt’s been a while since I’ve gently prodded you about pedagogical scholarship. It’s the beginning of the summer and although I know that some of you do teach for all or part of the summer, there are others who don’t teach during the summer or teach a lighter load. Many of us use the summer [...]
Faculty Learning Communities: Benefiting from Collective Wisdom
Posted Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerAn article in the January-February issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching reports on the experiences of a group of life sciences faculty who participated in a faculty learning community. “We wanted to bring together life sciences faculty members who would discuss and support each others’ teaching and learning goals, breaking down the communication barrier that characterizes most teaching activities in the sciences.” (p. 39)
Striking a Balance between Who You are and Realizing Your Teaching Potential
Posted Thursday, May 14th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerHere’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this weekend—how teachers balance between accepting who they are at the same time they push to realize as much of their teaching potential as possible.
Reflecting on Graduation
Posted Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI hope that graduation is one of those ceremonies that never goes out of style. It’s such a big deal for students and their families, and I think it’s a big event for faculty, as well. It just doesn’t feel as though the school year has properly ended without participation in graduation.
Team Teaching and Dialogic Pedagogy
Posted Thursday, May 7th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerThe past couple of days I’ve been wading through a fairly dense article on “dialogic pedagogy” as applied to team teaching. The authors, who have been collaborators since the early 1990s, team teach a 400-student introductory sociology course. They don’t team teach like most faculty do—they do what they describe as “joint” rather than “sequential” lectures. I’ll probably end up writing about their approach in the newsletter.
Taking Professional Development Seriously
Posted Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI have been struggling all morning to rewrite a chapter in my new book that has organizational problems. I was hoping the reviewers wouldn’t notice, but they did. I’m okay with the ideas. I think they make sense and put the right kind of frame around the rest of the book, but they don’t hang together like a frame. The chapter seems more like a mobile of free hanging ideas that loosely associate and occasionally bang into each other.