Teachers have much to teach these days. There’s the standard content knowledge students need to take from their courses, all the while the amount of new information in all our fields continues to grow exponentially. Next, there are all those essential intellectual skills like critical thinking, problem solving, analysis of evidence, argument construction to start the list. Then there are the basic skills many students are missing — like the ability to do college level reading, write coherently and calculate correctly — and all those study skills, like time management, review strategies, attentive listening and good note taking. Lastly, there are the metacognitive skills and the fact that most students aren’t aware of themselves as learners and don’t monitor how they are or are not learning. How in the world can a teacher address all these learning needs in a 15-week course?

With an increasing number of rating systems now online, the question of who completes those surveys (since not all students do) is one with important implications. Are those students dissatisfied with the course and the instruction they received more likely to fill out the online surveys? If so, that could bias the results downward. But if those students satisfied with the course are more likely to evaluate it, that could interject bias in the opposite direction.

For the past 25 years Bernard Sorofman has worked to build and maintain a collegial team within the department of pharmacy practice and science at the University of Iowa. In an interview with Academic Leader, he shared his techniques.

Analysis of GradeMark comments finds consistency across grade levels in instructor feedback
intended to progress student writing skills

The pedagogical periodical Teaching Theology and Religion has a unique section. In fact, many of the discipline-based periodicals on teaching and learning have interesting and relevant features, which is one of the reasons why I continue to bemoan the positioning of so much of our scholarship on teaching and learning in the disciplines. These journals regularly include research findings and great strategies that address aspects of teaching and learning that transcend disciplines.

New York, New York – With college students’ insatiable appetite for technology, and their growing dependence on mobile devices for instant information, socializing, and academic course materials, there is a fast-growing demand to keep mobile devices charged up on the go, especially on campus. goCharge (www.gochargenow.com; www.facebook.com/gochargenow), the nation’s leading provider of mobile device charging stations with built-in charging chords to accommodate nearly all models of cell phones, smart phones, tablets and music players, is smartly addressing this need. The company has installed hundreds of goCharge stations in high-traffic venues, including a vast array of college campuses across the United States.

Have you have heard of Garcetti v. Ceballos? This 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case involving Gil Garcetti, a district attorney for Los Angeles County, and Richard Ceballos, a deputy DA, had nothing to do with higher education and yet it has had a profound effect on the academic workplace, particularly at state-supported colleges and universities.

Many of us who teach in higher education do not have a teaching background, nor do we have experience in curriculum development. We know our content areas and are experts in our fields, but structuring learning experiences for students may or may not be our strong suit. We’ve written a syllabus (or were handed one to use) and have developed some pretty impressive assessments, projects, and papers in order to evaluate our students’ progress through the content. Sometimes we discover that students either don’t perform well on the learning experiences we’ve designed or they experience a great deal of frustration with what they consider high stakes assignments. Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) proposes that it’s important to determine the area (zone) between what a student can accomplish unaided and what that same student can accomplish with assistance. This provides for consistent structural support, when required (Hogan & Pressley, 1997).

Should instructors care whether or not students find their exchanges satisfying? They should, because as this research (and previous studies) document, those levels of satisfaction correlate positively and significantly with something these researchers call “affective learning.” Affective learning involves student feelings and emotions toward the subject matter and the teacher.