I attended the recent ISETL Conference (International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning). The conference is definitely worth attending. Of course, we do have a vested interest in your attendance at The Teaching Professor Conference, but even more important than that, is getting you to recognize the value of attending a teaching-learning conference. They offer such opportunities for growth and renewal. Check out: www.isetl.org and www.teachingprofessor.com)

I’m picking up where I left off with the previous blog entry. I’m still thinking about the evidence for active learning—those pedagogical practices that engage and involve students in learning processes directly. I’ve also been thinking about the faculty predilection (not at all universal but still reasonably widespread) to bad mouth educational research, or less flagrantly, to benignly neglect it.

I’m in the middle of a new book on learner-centered teaching, Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment, by Terry Doyle. The book offers lots of good advice on overcoming student resistance to learner-centered approaches, those that make students more responsible for their own learning. One suggestion (that comes off more like a theme, at least so far in the book) is that we share with students the research that justifies the approach. There is much evidence coming out of recent brain research (Doyle, by the way, does a really good job of explaining some of this very complicated work) that explains why this approach results in more and better learning for students.

A recent issue of an excellent pedagogical periodical, called Pedagogy, devotes itself to an exploration of professional development within English. One article describes experiences in a teaching circles program. Here’s a great quote that raises some important issues related to the challenges of talking teaching with colleagues.

“I have come to realize that it is not so much what students know as what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do.”

There’s a short article in a recent issue of College Teaching on a topic that I don’t see written about very often. I suspect we don’t think about it as often as we should either. It’s the matter of bias in grading.

A recently published study in the Journal of Higher Education offers some encouraging evidence about the role of teaching ability in the hiring process. More than 90 percent of the survey respondents rated candidates’ teaching ability as important or very important. Despite that stated importance, a bit less than 17 percent ask for a teaching philosophy statement as part of the credentials packet, less then 8 percent request student rating data, 4 percent ask for syllabi from courses taught previously and less than 1 percent require a teaching portfolio.

I was with a group of faculty yesterday. We were bemoaning how strongly grade-oriented most students are. Some of us thought faculty were too grade-oriented as well. One participant shared a small but unique way he tried to emphasize learning over grades.

Over the past several days I’ve been re-reading John Bean’s book, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Now, there’s a book I really wish I’d written. At this point it’s a classic, widely referenced, and one of the few books I regularly hear faculty recommending to each other.