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.

I’m back on the road this week and happy to be heading out. I’ve been home for the past three months and am ready to be back working with faculty. I often describe them as the students we all love to teach—bright, curious, intrinsically motivated, and always willing to participate.

In her article, Donna Bowles offered some useful and stimulating ideas on how the film The Wizard of Oz suggests the “characteristics necessary for teaching excellence.” I’m sure that Professor Bowles prompted many of us to consider other classics that serve as sources of pedagogical inspiration. For me, it’s a text I use in several of my courses, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, a famous and short book on political theory and practice produced in Renaissance Italy.

In the upcoming March issue of the Teaching Professor you’ll find highlights from two really excellent articles on teaching philosophy statements. I’ve been sort of down on these statements for a while now. When they are written to accompany job applications or to be included in tenure and promotion dossiers, or as part of a case for a teaching award, the motivation to write a “correct” or “impressive” statement gets in the way of writing a statement that truly reflects what the teacher thinks and believes.

In several of my books, I’ve referenced a wonderful classroom assessment query I came across in Teaching of Psychology, some years ago now. At the end of the course, the authors asked students to reflect back across the whole semester and then report the first 10 things they remembered about the course. Students were told not to edit their thinking but to simply write down the memories as they came to mind.

I read two articles last week in which faculty described teaching experiences that did not go quite as well as expected. In one case a math professor opted to teach an entry-level remedial math course. He knew the teaching would be challenging, but with 25 years of previous teaching experience and a newly minted Ph.D. in math education he thought he would be up to the task. The teaching turned out to be way more challenging than he expected and challenging in some surprising ways.

Do you use online quizzes? Have you thought about using them but are worried about academic integrity issues. Students do take the quizzes out of class and on their own time. Given rampant cheating in college courses already, why put students in such a tempting situation?

I am cleaning up my office after the book. I think a good half of my teaching-learning books (and I have a lots) are off the shelves and on the floor, desk, and table. Putting them away is a chance to look again at old favorites and find things missed or not remembered.