I had a terrible time getting to and from The Teaching Professor Conference this year. It was as if all of Delta Airlines conspired against me. I will spare you most of the details, but I ended up with a return ticket that had a 5 p.m. departure from Orlando connecting with a 2:15 p.m. departure from Atlanta (no, I don’t have the a.m. and p.m. mixed up). Apologies were offered for this “computer-generated” error (what kind of software program are they using?). Apologies were not forthcoming for cancelling direct service (permanently) between Atlanta and State College and not being able to get me home to State College on Sunday. I had an airport 125 miles from home.

Shelley Reid, an English professor at George Mason University, did a presentation on peer-review at the recent Teaching Professor Conference. (For information about The Teaching Professor Conference, visit www.teachingprofessor.com/conference/index.html.) She has written previously on the topic in The Teaching Professor. I attended her session and was not disappointed. Her thinking about how students can be substantively engaged with each other’s writing is robust and creative. The strategies she proposes avoid the problems that frequently emerge when students are asked to provide each other feedback and, as the title of her session indicates, get “Beyond ‘Good Job, Jenny.’”

I’ve been working on my article library here recently, exchanging paper copies for pdf files. It’s a great chance to re-read significant material. Yesterday it was a 1993 article in the Journal of Chemical Education (despite my humanities credentials, I’ve been a regular reader of this periodical for years) by Kersey Black. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve referred people to the article. At the time of the article Black taught organic chemistry, and in it he describes his growing discontent with lectures that basically re-do text content.

My blog entries aren’t generating as many responses as I had hoped. Some of you are sending me personal emails ... thanks. Be welcome to share your responses with all of us reading.

It’s Saturday morning, not yet 8:30 a.m. Eighty-three elementary and secondary education teachers are arriving for an eight hour class—part of a two-year masters degree program. Conversations buzz around the large auditorium style room. People meet, greet and move around the room. The background music is energetic. Pictures flash on the large screen at the front of the room. They show students completing a messy mask-making project. Then there’s snapshots taken at the recent marriage of a couple students in the class. These are followed by several pictures of new babies. By the time 8:30 arrives, noise rolls around the room. The four teachers responsible for the course mingle here and there, drinking coffee, answering questions, laughing and making small talk with students.

Frequently now, candidates for faculty positions are being asked to provide teaching philosophy statements. Bob Eierman reports that that request appears in 40 percent of the ads for chemistry positions that he looked at in a professional publication advertising positions in that field. Another 20 percent of the time the request is for a statement of teaching plans or interests.

In the May issue of The Teaching Professor, there’s a follow-up article that further explores the issue of control in the classroom and how much there needs to be to create the kind of environment learning demands. My colleague and good friend Mitch Zimmer came down pretty strongly on the side of control, citing as an example his use of seating charts.

We give students grades for two reasons. First, they fulfill our professional responsibility to certify mastery of material. That is, they measure how much and how well students have learned. But we also use grades to promote learning. Writing a paper or taking an exam forces students to confront content and in the process they learn the material, to varying degrees, of course. That benefit accrues before the work is graded.

Whatever the relative quality of a student’s response, faculty members can respond in ways that increase the likelihood of participation by students in the future or result in diminished participation through fewer responses and responses of lower quality.