I had breakfast with a good colleague this morning. We were following up on a conversation we’ve been having electronically. It started when I recommended a book that my colleague said he’d read; however he objected to all the “pronouncements” made by the author. He was referring to how this author tried to distill research findings on various topics into simple declarative statements and how those statements denied all the complexity and variability of the research. After reading his email, I looked at the blog entry I was working on ... one that summarized key findings from a study. There were pronouncements everywhere. I quickly revised, working to make the statements less definitive and more qualified. When I wrote my colleague and fessed up to what I’d discovered, he responded by saying that he’d just had a conversation with a colleague who asked him for some teaching advice. “All I did was make pronouncements,” he wrote.

A neighbor of mine has an 18-year-old friend who started his first year of college at the end of August. Last weekend he came home for the first time. My neighbor asked him what he’d learned so far in college. I complimented my neighbor for asking that question instead of the more common, “How are you doing in college?” But my neighbor was troubled by his friend’s response. “What have I learned in college? Gee, I don’t know … I haven’t really thought about it. Lots of stuff, I guess.”

While conducting a class, even though teachers may be doing all or most of the talking, students communicate important nonverbal messages. They communicate these messages through facial expressions, body postures, and how they say what they say, as well as what actions they do or the skills they attempt to perform. Both novice and expert teachers see the same student responses, but expert teachers see in those responses something very different than novices see.

In the process of preparing an article for the newsletter, I came across this observation: “Students who have the impression that nothing they do will alter the results of the learning process, or who attribute success to good luck and failure to bad luck, or who see the pedagogy and didactic practice of the professor as the sole determinant of success or failure, will make little effort to contribute to their own learning.” (p. 244)

The contribution that humor makes to student learning is well established in research. It is not that humor causes learning; rather, it helps to create conditions conducive to learning. It helps learners relax, alleviates stress, and often makes it easier for students and teachers to connect personally. The presence of humor in a classroom can be very beneficial.

I’d like to share a couple of the points made by Robert Zemsky in the second part of a two-part essay that appeared in Inside Higher Education. (There’s a link to this second part at the end of this post.) I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bob Zemsky’s work—he’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been on the forefront of efforts to reform higher edcuation for decades, and he’s a superb writer. In this article he put three items on the higher education reform to-do list. The first one is learning—I love that it was listed first.

I was reading an article that describes the attempts of a marketing department to standardize the various sections of an introductory principles of marketing course. In one part of the article the authors identify a number of benefits that accrue when there is consistency between sections. The fact that in many departments multiple sections of the same course are only loosely similar is a problem, and getting faculty all on the same page conceptually and pragmatically is also a problem. The experiences and results reported in the article are interesting.

That persona we don when standing before students is what Jay Parini refers to as a “teaching mask.”

Despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, many faculty members are uneasy about participating in assessment-related activities. One way to overcome negative feelings about assessment while promoting improved student learning is to encourage faculty to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).