In past essays, I’ve covered how students fool themselves into believing they have mastered concepts when they really haven’t and how faculty can fool themselves into thinking they have taught effectively when they haven’t. Now I want to focus on institutions of higher learning. I
A childhood friend of mine passed away a few years ago. We worked on the high school yearbook together, but what was for me an extracurricular became for him a lifelong passion for journalism. He majored in it in college and became a sports reporter.
There are dozens of teaching methods that a teacher might use, but instead of emphasizing their differences, I want to focus on what they have in common. These are practices that all teaching methods value. Used correctly, they are universal components of effective teaching. I
Back in 2008, I took part in a national task force whose goal was to plan for the future of the teaching of psychology. I led a group of faculty considering how teaching methods and approaches would change and evolve. As an opening activity,
I once visited my brother back when we were both young single professionals. For some reason, we decided to roast a whole duck for dinner. Neither of us knew much about cooking back then, much less roasting a duck, but it was OK because
There is a well-traveled, perhaps apocryphal, story about Super Bowl–winning former coach Bill Walsh. As he observed his assistants at practice one day, he was horrified by the amount of screaming directed at the players. According to the story, he gathered the coaches together and
Can we reform teaching and learning throughout higher education one class at a time? I used to think so, but the pace of change has made me less optimistic. I just finished preparing an article for The Teaching Professor newsletter that reports the results of
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