Magna Publications is now accepting proposals for the Teaching with Technology Conference, to be held October 6–8, 2017 in Baltimore, Md.
It all started 56 years ago with a brown paper sack. This no-frills carrier contained a stash of glue, crayons, scissors, and strips of construction paper. These were my teaching tools. According to my mother, I carried this sack with me everywhere. Naturally drawn to showing and explaining things, I later graduated to using a small chalkboard. When our cat had kittens, they became my pupils, though admittedly they were less attentive than my stuffed animals.
Now that you’ve finished assessing your students, it’s time to turn the assessment process around by looking in the mirror. If you limped across the finish line last semester, it may be time to identify some new strategies for self-care. In our “Tending the Teacher” session at the recent Teaching Professor Conference in Washington, D.C., we presented a menu of ideas to help faculty design a balanced and productive work life. Here are our top tips:
Exchanges about the relative merits of lecture and active learning continue, and these exchanges are becoming more acrimonious and polarized. Either you are for lecturing (and against active learning) or you’re for active learning (and against lecturing). Active learning advocates have the evidence; those who lecture stand on tradition. Where is this debate headed? How accurately does it reflect what’s actually happening in classrooms? Is there a viable place in the middle?
It takes a certain amount of courage to talk with students about course evaluation results. I’m thinking here more about formative feedback the teacher solicits during the course, as opposed to what’s officially collected when it ends. Despite how vulnerable revealing results can make a teacher feel, there are some compelling reasons to have these conversations and a powerful collection of benefits that may result from doing so.
Year after year, college faculty mark the end to the spring term by attending The Teaching Professor Conference. It’s the perfect venue to reflect, recharge, and rejuvenate while gaining a wealth of instructional ideas and valuable insights.
This Storify provides a collection of some of the tweets from the three-day event.
An initial look at a conference program can lead attendees to become (in the words of a former colleague) “paralyzed by the possibilities.” There are just so many sessions we’d like to attend that it’s hard to choose. At a recent conference, a new faculty member asked me for advice about negotiating the labyrinth. Here is a collection of strategies that I have developed over the years to help me make the most of the conference experience—before, during, and after the event.
Shortly after 2000, higher education institutions started transitioning from paper and pencil student-rating forms to online systems. The online option has administrative efficiency and economics going for it. At this point, most course evaluations are being conducted online. Online rating systems have not only institutional advantages but also advantages for students: students can take as much (or little) time as they wish to complete the form, their anonymity is better preserved, and several studies have reported an increase in the number of qualitative comments when evaluations are offered online. Other studies document that overall course ratings remain the same or are slightly improved in the online format.
The bulk of scholarship on teaching and learning continues to be embedded in our disciplines. It ends up there because that’s where it counts (if it does) and because there’s a long-standing and still fairly widely held belief that the teaching needed for a particular kind of content is unique. Unless you know the content, you can’t know how to teach it.
A couple of months ago a colleague asked me to recommend a book for his new faculty reading group. I rattled off the names of several, but then wondered if a packet of articles might not be a better option. When I started to identify articles, it came to me that the what-to-read dilemma for new and not-so-new faculty goes beyond the articles themselves. It is more about the categories of work on teaching and learning rather than individual pieces.
