A recent issue of an excellent pedagogical periodical, called Pedagogy, devotes itself to an exploration of professional development within English. One article describes experiences in a teaching circles program. Here’s a great quote that raises some important issues related to the challenges of talking teaching with colleagues.

“I have come to realize that it is not so much what students know as what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do.”

There’s a short article in a recent issue of College Teaching on a topic that I don’t see written about very often. I suspect we don’t think about it as often as we should either. It’s the matter of bias in grading.

A recently published study in the Journal of Higher Education offers some encouraging evidence about the role of teaching ability in the hiring process. More than 90 percent of the survey respondents rated candidates’ teaching ability as important or very important. Despite that stated importance, a bit less than 17 percent ask for a teaching philosophy statement as part of the credentials packet, less then 8 percent request student rating data, 4 percent ask for syllabi from courses taught previously and less than 1 percent require a teaching portfolio.

I was with a group of faculty yesterday. We were bemoaning how strongly grade-oriented most students are. Some of us thought faculty were too grade-oriented as well. One participant shared a small but unique way he tried to emphasize learning over grades.

Over the past several days I’ve been re-reading John Bean’s book, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Now, there’s a book I really wish I’d written. At this point it’s a classic, widely referenced, and one of the few books I regularly hear faculty recommending to each other.

Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

This particular list of characteristics appears in an excellent book that is all but unknown in the states, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, by noted scholar Paul Ramsden. In the case of what makes teaching effective, he writes, “…a great deal is known about the characteristics of effective university teaching. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter; there is no indication of one ‘best way,’ but our understanding of its essential nature is both broad and deep.” (p. 88–89). He organizes that essential knowledge into these six principles, unique for the way he relates them to students’ experiences.

Recently, I was vividly reminded that my responsibility as a teacher involves more than telling. Teachers also have an obligation to provide a supportive environment where students can learn by doing and by making mistakes.