Giving students some choice about which assignments they will complete or letting them decide how much the assignments will count in a grading scheme are learner-centered strategies that help develop student responsibility for learning. The ideas are simple: rather than a teacher mandated sequence of assignments, students are presented with assignment options and they decide which ones they will complete. Or, students do all the teacher selected assignments but determined what percentage of the grade each assignment is worth. Lots of variations are possible. In my graduate course on college teaching, students completed all five assignments, with each being worth 10 percent of their grade. I gave students the other 50% of their grade and let them divvy up that amount between the assignments.

It has not been a good week. While I was flying home from The Teaching Professor Conference, I got a call that my brother had an accident and broke his leg in three places. So I’ve been spending lots of time at the hospital and now lots of time taking care of this poor fellow who not only broke his leg but managed to have the accident in a patch of poison oak.

I’m just back from The Teaching Professor Conference. Part of what makes the event so successful is the way it confronts faculty with how much there is to learn about teaching and learning, and how much of that learning can be achieved by working with one another. Each year I am inspired by the insights participants bring to the conference and share freely with others.

“Why should we change the way we teach?” a marketing professor asked with an honest gaze and a smile that bespoke sincerity. It was early in a workshop session just after I’d introduced the idea of learner-centered teaching and explained why students should be doing more of the learning tasks themselves.

Deep and surface learning are terms familiar to most faculty. What is known by most is that these terms describe two different approaches to learning. Beyond that, most faculty knowledge is sketchy, although there has been quite a bit of educational research on the topic. I’ve been reviewing this seminal research—it is interesting and worth a revisit so that we might “deepen” our knowledge of what’s involved.

The close of the academic year brings with it the end of courses and the usual student ratings of those courses. Among many concerns related to this activity are those pertaining to the presence of certain items on the form. They ask irrelevant questions, given what and how we teach. Of course, that doesn’t seem to prevent students from offering evaluations in those areas.

Here are some survey results worth mulling over. A group of life sciences faculty were asked about teaching students “science process skills"—identified as data interpretation, problem solving, experimental design, scientific writing, oral communication, collaborative work, and critical analysis of primary literature.

I had breakfast with my colleague and friend Larry yesterday. We pretty much cover the higher education waterfront during these morning sessions. Among the many topics covered yesterday was the matter of how much time students spend studying, or as most faculty are more likely to note, how much time they don’t spending trying to master course content. In support of the lack of attention to studying that many of us see in our classes is all sorts of survey data (from the well-known NSSE surveys to findings reported in the new and much talked about book, Academically Adrift). Depending on the survey, something close to 80% of students are reporting that they spend less than 20 hours a week studying.

The May issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter highlights some content from a really excellent article on caring for students. The article by Steven A. Meyers summarizes research documenting the strong and positive association between caring and a variety of learning outcomes. It also addresses reasons why faculty object to the idea that they should care for students—reasons like, students not appreciating the way faculty do care, that caring compromises professional distance, and that teaching, not caring, is the job of academics.