Do better students sit in front, or does seat selection contribute to better grades? A recent study examined this question.

“The lecture when done well, goes far beyond covering the material. It is a carefully planned performance with student learning as its focus.” That quote by Harold B. White appears in a commentary column that is regularly included in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education.

Frank Heppner, a biology professor and author of Teaching the Large College Class: A Guidebook for Instructors with Multitudes, has been teaching large classes (and he considers 300 students a “small” class) for 38 years. He stopped counting the number of students taught once it reached 20,000.

It doesn’t look as though the RateMyProfessors.com website is going away anytime soon. I was somewhat surprised to learn that it was actually launched in 1999.

One of the points made regularly here on the blog and in the Teaching Professor newsletter is that students can learn from each other. It’s one of basic tenets of my educational philosophy, and support for it keeps growing across fields and research methodologies. I also believe that faculty regularly underestimate just has much students can learn from other students.

Take the plethora of information available online, add the ease of which students can cut-and-paste material, throw in lots of pressure to get good grades, and plagiarism becomes an appealing option to almost any student.

Looking for a great way to encourage students to accept responsibility for their learning? Learning contracts may accomplish that goal more effectively than almost any other instructional strategy. True, they aren’t viable when classes are large, and they aren’t likely to work well when students are very dependent learners. But for independent study projects, in small seminars and for more mature learners, they can effectively demonstrate what it means to take charge of one’s learning.

I’ve just put the May issue of the newsletter to bed, but I’m still thinking about an essay submitted by Huntly Collins, a journalism prof at La Salle University. Actually what Huntly shared was a much longer essay she’d prepared for her third-year review. I just culled a few prize paragraphs. Despite being a new college teacher, (it’s a second career after a highly successful one as a reporter), Huntly has learned some lessons that still escape others who have been teaching for years. Take this one for example.

“Rapport” is one of those words faculty frequently toss out when I ask them to describe the climate for learning in a classroom. I always snicker a bit at how many one-word answers the question engenders. Of course, the teacher asks for elaboration when the students respond with single words.