Have you ever heard of Eric Mazur? If you teach physics and are into that discipline’s pedagogical literature, in all likelihood you have. But Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, is someone all of us should know. The reference at the end of this post contains a succinct and compelling introduction to his work.

At my house, we’re deep into a host of summer projects and are having our usual communication difficulties. Yesterday my brother Charles and I were trying to help my husband Michael tie sheets of plywood to a cart so they could be transported to a work site. “Put the rope under the board. No, not all the way under. Put it under and over the top.” My mentally challenged brother is confused and frustrated as he tries to put the rope where Michael wants it. “No, loop it over.” I’m eager to help but I haven’t a clue where the rope is supposed to go.

I’ve been doing some presentations on classroom interaction and thinking yet again about how we could do better with our questions — the ones we ask in class or online. Good questions make students think, they encourage participation and I think they improve the caliber of the answers students give and the questions they ask. To achieve those worthwhile outcomes more regularly, I’d like to recommend three actions that have the potential to improve our questioning.

“I just don’t see how students learn anything when they talk to each other,” a faculty member told me recently. “Their conversations are so superficial. They get things wrong. I can hardly stand to listen to them.”

The June/July issue of The Teaching Professor contains highlights from an article that makes an important point about grade inflation. Not all grade inflation is bad. When grades are higher than they used to be and there’s no corresponding increase in student performance, then grade inflation is a problem. But as Mostrom and Blumberg point out, some teaching motivates students to work hard and achieve more. This “grade improvement,” as Mostrom and Blumberg call it, is good. It’s what all teachers should aspire to promote. We want our students to learn more and when they do, their grades should show it. This important distinction should be part of our thinking about grade inflation.

Each year Magna Publications sponsors an award recognizing an outstanding piece of scholarly work on teaching and learning. Authors received the award and its $1,000 stipend at the 9th annual Teaching Professor Conference this past weekend in Washington, D.C.

Not so long ago I challenged us to consider how our collections of active learning activities fit together. That got me thinking about the collection of assignments we have students complete in a course. How do they fit together? Why have we chosen that particular group?

Not so long ago in the blog we explored the weighting of course assignments. The more certain assignments count in the grading scheme, the more time students are likely to devote to them. That makes determining how much each assignments counts an important decision. Since then I’ve come across several reports and some research that suggest we should consider giving students a choice on assignment weightings. For example, if the course contains a number of quizzes and collectively they count for 20% of the grade, a student could decide at the beginning of the course to raise that percentage to 30 with the weight of the major exams decreased by a corresponding amount. Or, say there are three assignments in the course that equal 75% of the grade, the student could designate a weight for each assignment between 15% and 45% but the three must total 75%.

It’s that time of the year when students leave us. Some graduate and we celebrate their growth and intellectual accomplishments. We are sorry to see them go. Others cross the stage and their parting is no cause for sweet sorrow. Some leave without ever crossing the stage. And some temporarily leave, returning in the fall or for a summer session.