Faculty need to be very careful about how they commit their time and energy, so any potential partnership with student affairs need to be compelling and clearly articulated.

Learning communities, an approach to curriculum design that links two or more courses, can improve student success and retention and help students develop effective learning habits. Learning communities also can improve the instructors' teaching by exposing them to new teaching techniques and exploring connections between disciplines they might not have considered. However, to be successful, they require more planning and coordination than traditional courses, which requires a systematic approach to faculty development and support.

Nova Southeastern University's Master's in Health Law program is designed to encourage the creation of learning communities in which students view each other as partners rather than isolated individuals who happened to be working toward similar goals.

Susan Baim, assistant professor of business technology at Miami University-Middletown, uses weblogs to supplement her face-to-face courses to

I believe a good teacher, first, has a powerful faith in the future. Like the forester planting an oak seedling knowing he or she will never see the tree in all its glory, I know I may never see the fruits of my labors as teacher. My calling is to plant and nurture seeds that will grow and shape tomorrow.

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.