Most teachers work to add interest to lecture material in an attempt to keep students engaged. If they aren’t attending, they aren’t listening, and if they aren’t listening, it’s pretty hard to imagine them learning anything from a lecture. But is there a point at which the interesting details are more arresting than the content? And if that’s so, do those kinds of details get in the way of attempts to learn and apply content?

I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. After 10 years of teaching, I finally realize why students get so nervous about exams. It’s because taking an exam is a performance.

After years of stating my expectations for tutorial participation orally, I have developed a rubric that I think both improves my accountability as an assessor and provides my students with a clear sense of my expectations for class discussions. It also makes clear my focus in the small group setting: creating a “learners-centered,” as opposed to a “learner-centered,” environment.

Although group work can provide a welcome change to the regular classroom routine, the results are rarely all positive. Invariably, one or two students in each group, because they are shy or lack self-confidence, are reluctant to share their input. These are often the same students who have to be coaxed to participate in large class discussions. Because of group dynamics, the student who usually emerges as the group leader, either by default or proclamation, is often not sensitive to the need to engage the quieter students in the conversation. As a result, the more outspoken students may unwittingly extinguish the very dialogue that the small group is intended to promote.

I grew up watching M*A*S*H, a dramatic comedy set in a mobile U.S. Army hospital during the Korean War, and it has influenced my teaching in some surprising ways. One of the characters, Corporal Klinger, spent most of the series trying to get sent home. In one of my favorite episodes he tries to secure a compassionate leave to attend his grandmother’s funeral in Toledo, Ohio. His commanding officer, Colonel Henry Blake, reviews this latest request and discovers that Klinger has claimed dozens of grandparents’ deaths in the course of a single year, along with various unlikely permutations of this family crisis. Blake never accuses Klinger of lying; he just suggests it is remarkable that the same four grandparents could repeatedly meet such tragic ends.

Principles of Accounting has the reputation of being a “hard and boring” course. It is difficult to motivate students to invest the time and effort necessary to succeed in the course. To meet this challenge, we have assembled a list of eight simple rules for keeping students focused and motivated. These rules are not original, and they aren’t just for those of us who teach accounting classes. Indeed, most of these time-honored suggestions apply to any course students find hard and boring, and we think that makes them broadly applicable.

The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is in gaining useful student feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. Quantitative scales provide ambiguous statistics for such generic instructional areas as preparation, fairness in grading, etc., but they don’t include any formative commentary. Open-ended questions ask students what things the instructor should continue to include in or eliminate from the course, and students list items but often without any kind of rationale.

Have you tried implementing some active learning strategies in a large course only to find students resisting those efforts? You put students in groups and give them some challenging discussion questions, only to see most of them sitting silently while a few make feeble comments to which no one in the group responds.

When you assign your students to write a paper, do they know where to start? Upperclassmen surely do, but what about freshmen? Left to their own devices, they’ll likely turn to Google and Wikipedia as their main research tools, and may never even set foot in the library if they can help it.