The RateMyProfessor (RMP) site has been around now for more than a decade. As of 2013, it contained 14 million entries for more than 1.3 million professors from 7,000 schools. “Its express purpose is to serve as a resource for other users in their decision-making,
As a tenured full professor, I’m mostly scheduled for upper division and graduate courses. However, last year I taught two classes of traditional aged, first-year students. It was a good learning experience and provided me with new insights about beginning college students.
“Even measures with perfect validity can be rendered useless if they are interpreted incorrectly, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teaching evaluations are frequently the subject of unwarranted interpretations based on assumed levels of precision that they do not possess.” (p. 641) And now there’s some
Individual courses and degree programs give us the opportunity to move students along a developmental continuum. Content complexity grows across course sequences, as does student understanding of it. But are students growing as learners in the same way? Are we designing learning experiences so that
Nothing works quite as well as a good question when it comes to getting the intellectual muscles moving. Given the daily demands of most academic positions, there’s not much time that can be devoted to reflection about teaching. But good questions are useful because they
Stephen Brookfield is out with a third edition of The Skillful Teacher. Only a handful of books on teaching make it past the first edition so to be out with a third says something about the caliber of this publication. He notes in the preface
Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don’t, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I’ve completely forgotten that I wish I’d remembered. Case in point…
Whatever philosophical and empirical issues college teachers may have with the Rate My Professor (RMP) website, there is no denying that the site in now a huge repository of information on college teachers. The website reports that it contains 15 million ratings for 1.4 million
Clearly we are not always accurate in predicting students’ learning. Of equal concern, though, is the certainty of our belief that students are learning. The roots of these cognitive errors may lie in the common phenomenon of overconfidence bias that social psychologists have written about
If you’re looking for a way to improve your teaching, consider teaching squares. A teaching square consists of four faculty from different disciplines who visit each other’s classes within a two-to-three-week period. After the classroom visits, the four gather around coffee or a meal to
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