If you ask a faculty member to think of a new technique, strategy, assignment, activity or policy they’re using in their classroom and you ask where they got the idea, “from a colleague” is the most common answer. Interesting, isn’t it, that so much of our pedagogical knowledge is transferred orally. The beauty of it is that ideas are easily and freely exchanged via this mode. Somebody gives you a good idea for dealing with an instructional issue and you don’t have to worry whether it’s copyright protected. You don’t need to know where the idea came from or who originated it. Best of all you can borrow it and make changes without anybody’s permission.

In the now classic article Confidence in the Classroom: Ten Maxims for New Teachers, author Jim Eison offers priceless advice for new teachers. Over the years, I have given hundreds of copies of this article to new and not-so-new faculty. Even though it was published more than 20 years ago, it still deserves a place in your collection of indispensible articles on college teaching.

In a recent study, a group of 120 undergraduates were asked what percentage of a grade should be based on performance and what percentage on effort. The students said that 61% of the grade should be based on performance and 39% on effort.

Autonomous learners. What are they? Who are they? And, do we have any of them in our classes? As is often the case with teaching and learning terms, there is not a lot of definitional clarity. In this blog and elsewhere I have tended to used the terms autonomous learner, self-directed learner and independent learner pretty much interchangeably. It seems to me that’s what happens elsewhere in the literature as well.

I have to admit I’ve never been a terribly big fan of teaching awards. I know, teaching isn’t rewarded and recognized as it should be, so why in the world complain about something that does honor teaching excellence? Let me explain my concerns.

Thinking developmentally is one of those instructional design issues that we don’t do often enough. We understand that different learning experiences are appropriate for students at different levels. We expect a higher caliber of work from seniors than from those just starting college. But how often do we purposefully design a progression of learning experiences?

Last week somebody asked about my goals for this blog. I gave a rather generic answer and realized I hadn’t thought about goals since we first started the blog.

I’m still pondering why students don’t make better use of the feedback we provide on papers, projects, presentations, even the whole class feedback we offer after we’ve graded a set of exams. Yes, we do see improvement as we look back across a course, but we also see a lot of the same errors repeated throughout the course.

What does it take for an activity to qualify as active learning? How we define active learning makes a difference. For example, if participation is a perpendicular exchange where the teacher asks a question and one student answers, we know that one student had an active learning experience. We have to guess whether that exchange engaged other students.