Ron Berk has a nice “Tribute to Teaching” in the most recent issue of College Teaching. He uses the term “professosaurus” to describe senior faculty—I think he qualifies having recently retired after 37 years of teaching, most of it at Johns Hopkins University.

It’s been a while since I’ve gently prodded you about pedagogical scholarship. It’s the beginning of the summer and although I know that some of you do teach for all or part of the summer, there are others who don’t teach during the summer or teach a lighter load. Many of us use the summer time to pursue research and other scholarly projects. That’s fine … but some summer (preferably this one), let there be some time for writing on teaching and learning.

There are many reasons for doing so. First, you have ideas and experiences from which others can learn. Research continues to verify that colleagues are the most important source of ideas and information on teaching—whether we learn from them in face-to-face conversations or we read what they have written.

Second, we need more faculty contributing to practitioner knowledge base. Look how research has expanded the knowledge base in our disciplines. Think of what could happen in the pedagogical realm if more faculty shared what they know about teaching.

Third, what teachers learn (often the hard way) deserves to be preserved and passed on so that others don’t make the same mistakes. And, the act of writing down and preserving what we have discovered and come to believe is a way of valuing what we have learned and thereby valuing what we do.

The benefits of doing pedagogical scholarship outnumber and may well outweigh reasons for not doing it. Pedagogical scholarship provides the opportunity to reflect deeply, thoughtfully, and critically about an aspect of practice. It can provide the opportunity to answer a perplexing question about practice. Writing for publication necessitates a review of what others have written, thereby providing an opportunity for new learning. Pedagogical scholarship can renew and energize teaching that has gotten a bit tired. It reaffirms the importance, relevance, and value of what teachers try to do in the classroom. It can motivate change and encourage risk taking.

No, it’s not as easy to get pedagogical pieces published as it once was, but getting published is a bit of a game. Persistence pays off. And even if the piece is not published, the benefits listed above still accrue.

This blog and the newsletter demonstrate how diverse pedagogical scholarship is. The range of possibilities is enormous. There is room for creativity. You can start with something short, like an article for The Teaching Professor, Faculty Focus, or some other national or local publication.

An article in the January-February issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching reports on the experiences of a group of life sciences faculty who participated in a faculty learning community. “We wanted to bring together life sciences faculty members who would discuss and support each others’ teaching and learning goals, breaking down the communication barrier that characterizes most teaching activities in the sciences.” (p. 39)

Here’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this weekend—how teachers balance between accepting who they are at the same time they push to realize as much of their teaching potential as possible.

I hope that graduation is one of those ceremonies that never goes out of style. It’s such a big deal for students and their families, and I think it’s a big event for faculty, as well. It just doesn’t feel as though the school year has properly ended without participation in graduation.

The past couple of days I’ve been wading through a fairly dense article on “dialogic pedagogy” as applied to team teaching. The authors, who have been collaborators since the early 1990s, team teach a 400-student introductory sociology course. They don’t team teach like most faculty do—they do what they describe as “joint” rather than “sequential” lectures. I’ll probably end up writing about their approach in the newsletter.

I have been struggling all morning to rewrite a chapter in my new book that has organizational problems. I was hoping the reviewers wouldn’t notice, but they did. I’m okay with the ideas. I think they make sense and put the right kind of frame around the rest of the book, but they don’t hang together like a frame. The chapter seems more like a mobile of free hanging ideas that loosely associate and occasionally bang into each other.

I believe I did a blog along these lines about this time last year—about The Teacher Professor Conference (this year June 5-7 in Washington, D.C., info at www.teachingprofessor.com). We would love to have you join us. We work very hard to make it a great event, and so far I’ve been very proud of how these conferences have turned out. There’s a variety of sessions, all carefully selected, many of which participants tells us are over-the-top excellent. We bring some big names to the conference—people you can really learn from as well as vendors with resources on teaching and learning. It’s a short compact schedule and by most standards, it’s not an expensive conference.

“The lecture when done well, goes far beyond covering the material. It is a carefully planned performance with student learning as its focus.” That quote by Harold B. White appears in a commentary column that is regularly included in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education.