I’ll probably never stream Netflix’s The Chair or read Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members trilogy, even though colleagues have been recommending them to me for years. After a long day, I don’t always want to commit several hours—or several hundred pages—to a fictional version of
In many classrooms right now, silence has become palpable. It may look like disengagement, exhaustion, anxiety, resistance, uncertainty, or some combination of these. This past semester, in one of my courses, I would ask the class an open-ended question about the day’s materials and wait
Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, I attended a high school college fair as an alumnus college representative. I had been an undergraduate at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, and was enthusiastic about answering questions from prospective
This past fall, I lost my job. As a tenured full professor at a state university, that is not a sentence I ever thought I would write. I study higher education, and I live in the state with the lowest public funding for its colleges,
There are moments in a semester when teaching feels steady, even productive, and yet you feel less connected to the work than you would like. You are showing up, teaching your classes, and meeting expectations, but the deeper sense of meaning that brought you to
Summer flexibility presents a pedagogical paradox of sorts. On the one hand, summer is the perfect time to reflect on our teaching, change out required readings, fine-tune assignments, and generally modify course design. On the other hand, come the last day of the academic year,
Early in my career, I interpreted most classroom problems at face value. A disengaged student seemed unmotivated. Missing assignments looked like irresponsibility. Frustration during class activities appeared to reflect lack of effort. But after teaching across middle school, high school, and college classrooms while simultaneously
I have been teaching at the college and university level for the past 30 years, and for many of those years, I have taught introductory first-year courses. As I creep closer to retirement, I’ve been reflecting on how teaching first-years has challenged me over the
I was recently invited to write an essay about a pedagogy of joy, an approach to teaching that treats joy as part of learning. I had a visceral reaction and wanted to say, “No, thank you.” But I didn’t, even though I felt my body
Two of my past articles for The Teaching Professor describe different types of educational “moments”: teaching moments and critical moments. Although I have been in the classroom for nearly 35 years, I continue to seek out strategies, like these moments, to fine-tune my teaching. In
