My friend Karen is here for the week—good friends are such a gift. When she came last year I taught her how to knit. My goodness, talk about a duck taking to water. With almost no instruction, she had it and was off. In one year she’s learned techniques it took me years, dare I say decades, to figure out. She’s as good a knitter as I am and already knows way more about yarns that I do. Brand names and fiber content roll off her tongue, and we talk about matching yarns and patterns. At the moment, we’re both into shawls, which I learned are held together with shawl picks or pins. And I thought you just kept your arms shut. When I exclaim in wonder at how much she knows and everything she can do, like any respectful student she defers, “I can’t be better than you. I’ve only been knitting for a year!”

During my drive down to Pennsylvania this week, I was listening to an interview with a sculptor. The interviewer asked if he was still teaching. “No, I’m not. Teaching sculpture is easier than doing it. I need to devote my efforts to doing it.” His comment reminded me of that old adage. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Since the interview I’ve been wondering (yet again) if teaching really is easier than doing—teaching writing is easier than writing, teaching problem solving is easier than solving problems, teaching physical therapy is easier than being a physical therapist.

I’m still thinking about participation ... even more convinced of the point in the previous blog ... we need to be asking questions that do a better job of engaging students’ interests. I’ve also been thinking about how I don’t often prepare questions. I tend to ask when something comes to mind, as the session is unfolding. When I prepare, I work on the content. I review the material, think about how to structure the content, and try to generate good examples, but I don’t prepare questions, especially questions that aim to tap whatever interests learners might have in the topic. I need to start working on questions like that.

“What can a teacher do ... to encourage students to take a deep approach to learning? Hanging in the front office of the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair is an old poster from the 1930s. It’s one of those Depression era placards encouraging schoolchildren to develop good habits. A little boy is tugging at a large yellow question mark, hooking a book labeled ‘knowledge.’ The caption reads: ‘Ask Questions. Sometimes the only way you can capture Mr. Knowledge is with a question mark.’ A bit stilted and old fashioned, the poster nevertheless captures something we’ve known for a long time. People are most likely to learn deeply when they are trying to answer their own questions or solve their own problems.

We’ve visited this topic before: the quality of feedback students provide on those end-of-course ratings. Many students fail to take the evaluation process seriously because, unless they plan on taking another course with that professor, the feedback will provide little benefit to them even if, by chance, the professor decides to act on it.

Here’s something I was surprised to find. A group of researchers in the UK decided to show students how to use written feedback on papers to improve their writing. They collected feedback given students on eight previous writing assignments and had writing tutors review and analyze the comments. Then they looked at the writing assignment students were to complete next, paying special attention to the stated criteria for grading, and developed a specific set of recommendations for each individual student.

I’m home from another successful Teaching Professor Conference and couldn’t be more pleased with how things went. For three days, we had more than 600 enthusiastic participants soaking up everything the conference offers. Whether it was the viewing posters after the keynote Friday night, interacting with new colleagues before and after sessions, or showing up for the last scheduled concurrent session, participants were there, sharing insights, asking questions, making comments, disagreeing, offering examples, and learning from each other. By Sunday afternoon, most of us were talked out about teaching, but energized (if not a bit exhausted) by the many valuable exchanges.

I enjoyed as an especially well-written commentary by Miriam Marty Clark in the current issue of Pedagogy. She confesses to a “growing skepticism” she has come to feel about critical thinking “and the place it holds in discussions of university education.” (p. 326)

We’ve moved up to our summer home and I’ve decided to start composting. We live on an island that is mostly rock. When we had the place excavated, the engineers called what’s on the ground organic matter and decreed it wasn’t deep enough for anything like a conventional septic system. There is no topsoil anywhere that I’ve been able to find … so composting makes good sense, to say nothing of having less garbage to haul to the local dump.