I wish I could erase the negative associations that surround the word improve. Improvement is not a dirty word, but it is somehow equated with the sense of deficiency—the sense that something is not right or needs to be fixed. Unfortunately these connotations premise the quest for better teaching on notions of remediation and deficiency. This doesn’t make improvement a positive, affirming process.

Have you seen this article in the June issue of the Atlantic? http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college If you haven’t, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. The writing is powerful; the message depressing at the same time it’s provocative. A very smart writing teacher I know described the piece as “a screaming canary, showing off about a dozen things going wrong in the coal mine.”

I’ve been on the road quite a bit during this past month. It will be good to be home for awhile but participating in conferences with different faculty groups and doing presentations at various sorts of institutions is a great way for me to keep my finger on the pulse of teaching and learning in higher education. You see a lot, learn lot and understand more things better.

Despite increased external pressure on teaching and learning innovation, top-down, centralized strategic initiatives usually fail to produce large-scale transformational change. And the problem with smaller-scale pedagogical innovation is that the impact is rarely felt beyond those directly involved, says Johanna Duponte, acting dean of health sciences at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts.

My blog entry for June 3 highlights some content from an article in which a chemistry prof recounts his experiences moving away from lecture. It promoted a “devil’s advocate” comment from Wendy. “When we went to college most faculty presented the material in lectures and we learned. What’s different today? Why are lectures no longer sufficient? Have learners changed?”

It was the last time slot for sessions at The Teaching Professor Conference in Orlando. The room was full with close to 100 faculty attending a session on active learning. But the conference was winding down and people were tired.

I had a terrible time getting to and from The Teaching Professor Conference this year. It was as if all of Delta Airlines conspired against me. I will spare you most of the details, but I ended up with a return ticket that had a 5 p.m. departure from Orlando connecting with a 2:15 p.m. departure from Atlanta (no, I don’t have the a.m. and p.m. mixed up). Apologies were offered for this “computer-generated” error (what kind of software program are they using?). Apologies were not forthcoming for cancelling direct service (permanently) between Atlanta and State College and not being able to get me home to State College on Sunday. I had an airport 125 miles from home.

Shelley Reid, an English professor at George Mason University, did a presentation on peer-review at the recent Teaching Professor Conference. (For information about The Teaching Professor Conference, visit www.teachingprofessor.com/conference/index.html.) She has written previously on the topic in The Teaching Professor. I attended her session and was not disappointed. Her thinking about how students can be substantively engaged with each other’s writing is robust and creative. The strategies she proposes avoid the problems that frequently emerge when students are asked to provide each other feedback and, as the title of her session indicates, get “Beyond ‘Good Job, Jenny.’”

I’ve been working on my article library here recently, exchanging paper copies for pdf files. It’s a great chance to re-read significant material. Yesterday it was a 1993 article in the Journal of Chemical Education (despite my humanities credentials, I’ve been a regular reader of this periodical for years) by Kersey Black. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve referred people to the article. At the time of the article Black taught organic chemistry, and in it he describes his growing discontent with lectures that basically re-do text content.