Management professor David A. Whetten, who now directs a faculty development center, admits with honesty that for some years he didn’t think there was much he could learn from people who “studied” education. After all, he was in the classroom doing education and had learned much from that experience. In a wonderful piece [reference below] he explains how a conversation with his golf instructor resulted in an important insight about the nature of experiential learning.

So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course — from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assignments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes.

Following up on the previous post, I wanted to write a bit about how teachers might intervene with those students who don’t believe they can learn something, whether it’s math, writing, French, economics, or whatever it is you teach.

The midwife is still my favorite metaphor for teaching. I don’t think there’s a metaphor that more aptly captures the complexity, power, and richness of the dynamic relationship between teachers, students, and learning. The metaphor is not original with me, and although I have read some quibbles in the literature as to who first proposed it, I first encountered it in a 1986 Harvard Educational Review essay by William Ayers. Here’s some of my current thinking about how the midwife mirrors all that a good teacher should be.

If Web 1.0 was about information, then Web 2.0 is about sharing information. This second generation of the Web is more personalized, more collaborative, and more engaging. Is it any wonder faculty are looking for ways to leverage these capabilities in their courses?

We know that what students believe about themselves as learners makes a difference, but sometimes a specific example really makes the point. Here’s a study that does just that. It involved beginning students taking a general chemistry course. At the beginning of the course they took a Self-Concept Inventory designed for chemistry students. Its five scales measure, among other things, a chemistry self-concept, a mathematics self-concept, and an academic self-concept.

If you have been teaching for any time at all, I’ll bet you’ve encountered what I call the interested but noncompliant student (hereafter, the INC). Here are some examples encountered in my courses: In an ancient language course, one INC would not take the trouble to learn her noun forms and verb endings but, fascinated by the language, went online to find an inscription that she tried to decipher. Another INC read more than I have in a subdivision of my field. He wanted to talk about it endlessly before and after class, so much so that I had to chase him away to give other students a chance to talk to me. Am I describing student behaviors that sound familiar?

Managing students who are disruptive, those who lack motivation and appear as though they would rather be any place than in the classroom, is easier when faculty take the right stance. Anything is possible when faculty have faith in the students they teach. Learning starts with a dedicated teacher interested in meeting the challenge of how to present content in a way that successfully navigates the barriers students erect.

The scholarship of teaching movement has made us aware that the effectiveness of those new activities and approaches we implement in the classroom must meet higher standards of evidence. Even though we may be thrilled with the effectiveness of what we tried, it no longer suffices to say that we thought it worked really well and our students loved it. Evidence of effectiveness needs to include more objective measures of success.