We’ve all seen those survey results where employers and recruiters list the skills and characteristics they are most looking for in college graduates. And I expect you know that teamwork, the ability to work in groups with others, is always high on the list (second only to communication skills in a Wall Street Journal survey of recruiters). Despite that, widespread faculty endorsement of group work is still largely tentative. Even faculty who use group work have concerns about the caliber of the exchanges, whether there’s appropriate leadership, and who’s doing the work.

If you’re on a semester calendar, this academic year is winding down. As courses come to a close, it’s time for those end-of-course ratings which many of us administer with some cynicism.

As regular blog readers know, I read a variety of pedagogical periodicals in which I almost always find content relevant to all teachers, not just those in the periodical’s discipline. I have written previously about how the positioning of pedagogical scholarship so extensively within the disciplines concerns me. I know there are instructional issues that are discipline specific, but my long years of reading this literature have convinced they are far fewer than those issues shared by all disciplines. But that’s background for what I wanted to write about in this entry.

In a previous blog entry, we revisited the market metaphor and its applicability to higher education. Robert Knapp pointed out some of the comparisons that stimulate thought, analysis and hopefully response. But he concluded, as most in higher education have, that overall, a business model does not capture what higher education aspires to be about.

I’m always on the lookout for new teaching metaphors and I found a good one this weekend.

I remember the first time something in the newsletter generated all kinds of reader response ... well, the very first time was when I used “criteria” when I should have written “criterion”, but the first response to substance involved an article suggesting that higher education ought to be run more like a business. The response was overwhelmingly negative—some of it thoughtful, a lot of it visceral. It is a metaphor that still rankles and does not do justice, given the aims and purposes of higher education. But as Robert H. Knapp, Jr. points out, the metaphor does highlight some comparisons to which educators should attend.

I wonder about the long-term effects of grades on the ability to self-assess. I got to thinking about this after I read the study referenced below. In it, 97 students assessed the participation of their peers and their own participation. Professors in the study also assessed students’ participation. The researchers looked at the correlations between peer assessment and teacher asssessments, and between self assessment and teacher assessments.

I was reading something yesterday that referenced Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher. The first edition was published 1990, a second in 2006. The book is a classic.