As this example illustrates, scholarship doesn't always have to take the form of articles in refereed journals and sometimes when the scholarship is pedagogical, other formats make very good sense.

Here’s an idea of that could benefit every discipline. A couple of psychology faculty members surveyed job ads posted by their professional association to identify which courses new faculty were most often asked to teach. They identified four courses, listed in 45 percent of the ads. Their point: graduate schools ought to be sure that their students are prepared to teach these courses.

The September 4 blog offers criteria for assessing the contributions of individual students when they work on group projects.

“Truly awful teaching in higher education is most often revealed by a sheer lack of interest in and compassion for students and student learning. It repeatedly displays the classic symptom of making a subject seem more demanding than it actually is. Some people may get pleasure from this kind of masquerade. They are teaching very badly if they do. Good teaching is nothing to do with making things hard. It is nothing to with frightening students. It is everything to do with benevolence and humility; it always tries to help students feel that a subject can be mastered; it encourages them to try things out for themselves and succeed at something quickly.” (p. 98)

Here’s a guest blog written by Keith Starcher who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University.

I’m currently writing and thinking about ways to change faculty thinking about student evaluation. We need a whole new paradigm—one that gets teachers focused on improving student learning and pursues better teaching as a byproduct of that first endeavor. Teaching will still improve but the focus on learning changes some other important dynamics. It means that students are much more likely to become collaborators, allies in a shared endeavor.

Writing about his maturation as a teacher, Kent Sandstrom (in one of my all time favorite articles) describes how he began his teaching career with such ambitious and lofty goals. In the tradition of Dewey he aspired to educate citizens for lives of social activity and responsibility.

Need a good list of behaviors that students can assess when they work with each other in small groups? Diane Baker, in an excellent article on peer assessment in small groups (I’ll be excerpting more from it in an upcoming issue of the newsletter), reviewed a wide collection of instruments and found that although the number of items varied, most included some iteration of these eight behavioral components.