I’ve been reading some articles on self-assessment—as in having students look at their own work and come to some conclusions about its quality. Most faculty don’t let students self-assess and for good reasons. Most students can’t get past the grade they would like to the one they deserve. Moreover, several of the studies I’ve read document that when given the opportunity, given the criteria, and even given some guidance, students still see the activity as an opportunity to figure out what the instructor wants and/or would likely give them on the completed work. Almost none of them see self-assessment as a useful skill.

I was on the way from the Portland airport to my Dad’s place, being driven by a childhood friend who now runs a pick up and delivery business. We left the four lane and followed winding country roads on our way to Forest Grove, a small town at the base of the coast range in Oregon. We came to an intersection. There wasn’t a stop sign or a stop light but there in the middle of open fields was a beautifully landscaped round-about, two lanes wide. Down the road another half mile was another. Not the place you’d ever expect to find round-abouts. “Excuse me,” my friend said, “but that’s what people with education do.”

We do tend to get carried away with lofty academic definitions—they are precise and detailed—but sometimes simple captures the essence in a much more compelling way. I’ve read all sorts of definitions for problem solving, most sounding something like this: “any goal-directed sequence of cognitive operations.” Fine, but put that definition alongside this one: “what you do when you don’t know what to do.” [Both of these definitions appear in the article referenced below and the functional definition is attributed to another source.]

Sometimes when words get bandied about, their meanings become less precise and that loss of meaning is overlooked because we all think we know what the term means. Case in point: empower, as in empowered learners or empowering instructors. Some faculty object to the verb empower because they think it means students taking charge and making learning decisions best left to teachers.

A discussion with faculty at South Dakota State University got me thinking about questions and how often we forget the power of a good question to stimulate discussion. When discussion plods along without much insight or inspiration, we are quick to blame students and they are not blameless. Some days (in some classes, most days) their motivation to answer questions registers right around zero.

You may recall that McGraw-Hill and Magna (the folks who bring you this blog and The Teaching Professor newsletter) are sponsoring a scholarly work on teaching and learning award. The first award will be given at The Teaching Professor Conference June 5-9 in Washington, D.C.

I’m back on the road this week and happy to be heading out. I’ve been home for the past three months and am ready to be back working with faculty. I often describe them as the students we all love to teach—bright, curious, intrinsically motivated, and always willing to participate.

In the upcoming March issue of the Teaching Professor you’ll find highlights from two really excellent articles on teaching philosophy statements. I’ve been sort of down on these statements for a while now. When they are written to accompany job applications or to be included in tenure and promotion dossiers, or as part of a case for a teaching award, the motivation to write a “correct” or “impressive” statement gets in the way of writing a statement that truly reflects what the teacher thinks and believes.

In several of my books, I’ve referenced a wonderful classroom assessment query I came across in Teaching of Psychology, some years ago now. At the end of the course, the authors asked students to reflect back across the whole semester and then report the first 10 things they remembered about the course. Students were told not to edit their thinking but to simply write down the memories as they came to mind.