We’ve moved up to our summer home and I’ve decided to start composting. We live on an island that is mostly rock. When we had the place excavated, the engineers called what’s on the ground organic matter and decreed it wasn’t deep enough for anything like a conventional septic system. There is no topsoil anywhere that I’ve been able to find … so composting makes good sense, to say nothing of having less garbage to haul to the local dump.

Our students seem to be masters at multitasking—they regularly do more than one thing at once, or break from one task to work on another and then move on to a third. Even those of us not so adept at managing more than one task at once can “walk and chew gum,” which makes us all multitaskers to some degree. But our students combine so many disparate tasks: biology book open on their knees, they text a friend while listening to rap in the background. Many of them tell us they can’t study when everything is quiet.

Ron Berk has a nice “Tribute to Teaching” in the most recent issue of College Teaching. He uses the term “professosaurus” to describe senior faculty—I think he qualifies having recently retired after 37 years of teaching, most of it at Johns Hopkins University.

Humanities and social sciences instructors have long borrowed from media communications to drive home concepts. For example, a business instructor might clip a magazine article pointing out how inappropriate attire can negatively influence the outcome of an interview with a company. Philosophy professors might motivate a classroom discussion on hedonism by discussing the antics of popular young superstars as reported in the tabloids.

It’s been a while since I’ve gently prodded you about pedagogical scholarship. It’s the beginning of the summer and although I know that some of you do teach for all or part of the summer, there are others who don’t teach during the summer or teach a lighter load. Many of us use the summer time to pursue research and other scholarly projects. That’s fine … but some summer (preferably this one), let there be some time for writing on teaching and learning.

There are many reasons for doing so. First, you have ideas and experiences from which others can learn. Research continues to verify that colleagues are the most important source of ideas and information on teaching—whether we learn from them in face-to-face conversations or we read what they have written.

Second, we need more faculty contributing to practitioner knowledge base. Look how research has expanded the knowledge base in our disciplines. Think of what could happen in the pedagogical realm if more faculty shared what they know about teaching.

Third, what teachers learn (often the hard way) deserves to be preserved and passed on so that others don’t make the same mistakes. And, the act of writing down and preserving what we have discovered and come to believe is a way of valuing what we have learned and thereby valuing what we do.

The benefits of doing pedagogical scholarship outnumber and may well outweigh reasons for not doing it. Pedagogical scholarship provides the opportunity to reflect deeply, thoughtfully, and critically about an aspect of practice. It can provide the opportunity to answer a perplexing question about practice. Writing for publication necessitates a review of what others have written, thereby providing an opportunity for new learning. Pedagogical scholarship can renew and energize teaching that has gotten a bit tired. It reaffirms the importance, relevance, and value of what teachers try to do in the classroom. It can motivate change and encourage risk taking.

No, it’s not as easy to get pedagogical pieces published as it once was, but getting published is a bit of a game. Persistence pays off. And even if the piece is not published, the benefits listed above still accrue.

This blog and the newsletter demonstrate how diverse pedagogical scholarship is. The range of possibilities is enormous. There is room for creativity. You can start with something short, like an article for The Teaching Professor, Faculty Focus, or some other national or local publication.

An article in the January-February issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching reports on the experiences of a group of life sciences faculty who participated in a faculty learning community. “We wanted to bring together life sciences faculty members who would discuss and support each others’ teaching and learning goals, breaking down the communication barrier that characterizes most teaching activities in the sciences.” (p. 39)

During the past 10 years or so, higher education institutions have made strides in transitioning from an instructor-centered approach to a learner-centered approach to teaching. These strides, both large and small, have transformed the college classroom environment to provide students with greater opportunities for active learning, collaboration, and engagement.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this weekend—how teachers balance between accepting who they are at the same time they push to realize as much of their teaching potential as possible.

The past couple of days I’ve been wading through a fairly dense article on “dialogic pedagogy” as applied to team teaching. The authors, who have been collaborators since the early 1990s, team teach a 400-student introductory sociology course. They don’t team teach like most faculty do—they do what they describe as “joint” rather than “sequential” lectures. I’ll probably end up writing about their approach in the newsletter.