What are your institution’s signature programs—those programs that epitomize your institution’s mission and define its distinctiveness in the marketplace? It’s a question that every institution should address, particularly when faced with increasing competition and decreasing resources, says Jonnie Guerra, vice president for academic affairs at Cabrini College in Pennsylvania.

Instructors who are new to the online classroom often struggle with the issue of how to be rigorous while creating a safe learning environment, and mistakenly think, “You can be nice or demanding, but somehow you can’t be both.” “That’s absolutely not true,” says Andrea Sanders, associate professor of English at Chattanooga State Technical Community College.

Writing about his maturation as a teacher, Kent Sandstrom (in one of my all time favorite articles) describes how he began his teaching career with such ambitious and lofty goals. In the tradition of Dewey he aspired to educate citizens for lives of social activity and responsibility.

Engrossed in a flow of online teaching, I was suddenly aware of insistent knocking. Because teaching is interrupted only for emergencies, I paused in midsentence to open the door. A student worker handed me a document that I had already accessed online. When asked, the student worker said she was told to distribute the document to faculty. Rather than place the document in either of my mailboxes, she had brought the paper directly to me.

Are your experienced faculty members as effective in the classroom as you would like them to be? If not, perhaps a faculty development program like the University of Minnesota’s Mid-Career Teaching Program could be the answer.

Two years ago, a midcareer colleague in the mathematics department sent around an e-mail to all faculty at our college, inviting us to read a book with her. And as simply as that, a teaching circle was formed.

A worthwhile faculty retreat can breathe new life into the academic community. The structure and content of a good retreat can contribute to the development of college or school identity and can inspire a shared sense of reflection and forward motion.

Need a good list of behaviors that students can assess when they work with each other in small groups? Diane Baker, in an excellent article on peer assessment in small groups (I’ll be excerpting more from it in an upcoming issue of the newsletter), reviewed a wide collection of instruments and found that although the number of items varied, most included some iteration of these eight behavioral components.

Sometimes we get into it with students. Most often it involves grades, exams, and excuses. And most often, at least from our perspective, the students don’t have a case. The grade is fair, the exam contains predictable content, and the offered excuse is lame. We dismiss the complaint and deny that a problem exists.