Here’s a definition for classroom management: “the provisions and procedures necessary to establish and maintain an environment in which instruction and learning can occur.” The definition is attributed to W. Doyle, in a source I wasn’t able to locate online. I’ve never really thought about a definition for classroom management. I’ve always considered it a euphemism for classroom discipline—a nicer way of describing disruptive behavior and teachers’ need to deal with students behaving badly.

Reflecting on my career as a teaching psychologist, I realized I was missing something. Trained as an experimentalist and employed academically to teach courses in the experimental areas of psychology, I would occasionally teach introduction to psychology. However, I would always feel much more comfortable teaching the part of the course that tended to be experimental in content in contrast to the portion that was more applied with topics such as counseling and clinical, abnormal, and therapeutic psychology. Also, as an academic adviser, I would often find that I wasn't able to offer a thorough depiction of what students could expect when employed after graduation in areas of psychology dealing with humans in therapeutic scenarios.

A large study of students enrolled in geography courses at multiple universities in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States looked at their conceptions of geography, teaching, and learning. Each was considered separately.

Faculty roles are defined by a combination of institutional culture and discipline standards, and achieving the right balance among teaching, scholarship, and service should be an important consideration for individual faculty members and their chairs and deans.

The relatively new pedagogical periodical Academy of Management Learning & Education has a regular feature I very much enjoy and wish was part of more of the discipline-based periodicals on teaching and learning. Noted teachers and scholars in the discipline are interviewed and asked questions about teaching, learning and education. Besides being well edited and good reading, the interviews permanently record the wisdom of faculty from whom others can learn much.

Not everything I read in the pedagogical literature is wonderful. A lot of it is just kind ho-hum; a bit really raises the hair on the back of my neck.

Early advocates of online learning focused their efforts on demonstrating online learning's legitimacy to the broader community. Now, as an increasing body of literature supports the notion that there are no significant differences in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face courses, these advocates have expanded their efforts to address issues of student and faculty support and resource allocation.

With the growth of distance education and changes in student demographics, the traditional class schedule, when a class meets two or three times a week, may no longer be what students want or need to meet their educational goals. In its place, institutions are offering online, hybrid, and accelerated courses, which provide greater flexibility and can improve student learning and retention.

“I’d like to share a really low-point in my teaching.” Wow! Most faculty don’t admit teaching errors in public venues, but this faculty member was participating in a lunchtime discussion with about 12 of her colleagues. She’s a biologist and the course was microbiology for nurses. The low point involved a comment made by a student with whom she had developed a relationship. Clearly a student wouldn’t make an admission like this if she (it was a she in this case) wasn’t comfortable with the faculty member. It was the end of the course and the student was doing well, and she pretty much had her A nailed down. Despite that, she said to her teacher, “I really don’t understand why they make us take a stupid microbiology course.”