Fairly early in my editorship of The Teaching Professor, we published an article that drew some comparisons between students and customers. Never before and not since has a piece generated the response that one did. Education is not a product. Students may pay tuition but that money doesn’t buy grades. With education the customer cannot always be right. The notes just kept coming and coming.

A recent analysis of teaching award winners in Australia found that the majority were active researchers. That finding may contradict other research that has consistently failed to establish links between teaching effectiveness and research productivity. I wrote about this in a Feb 20th blog note. I’d say the weight of the evidence is still on the side of no relationship, despite this finding. The n here was quite small, and these were exceptional teachers.

My favorite article in the April issue of The Teaching Professor is written by two faculty members at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. One of the two, an engineer, decided to take a history class from the other. It doesn’t sound like they knew each other prior to this time. They write back and forth about the experience and their perspectives on what was happening. The part I like best is when the “student” faculty member describes how worried she was about her performance in the class. She tried harder than most students because she was afraid she’d lose face in front of her colleague. The colleague writes back that she never gave a thought about how her colleague would perform. She was too busy worrying what her colleague was thinking about her teaching and how she conducted the class.

I never quite believe how long and how hard my husband is willing to work on pieces of junk—old relics that have long given up the ghost. One time it was an old milk truck without brakes and multiple loose parts that flew­­ off when it careened around corners the few times it actually ran. Another time it was a $25 motorcycle. We have two 45 year-old, huge and rusty Allis Chalmers Crawlers—one runs, sort of, the other is for spare parts. Most recently it’s a 1963 International Scout that came with a snow plow that I’ve dubbed POS (piece of, you know, the s word). For starters, POS has almost no body parts; no windshield, dash, windows, doors, or roof. A few parts like fenders have been cobbled together from cast-off pieces of sheet metal.

Recently I worked with a group of faculty who teach cohort groups. Students start this professional program as a group and they move, lockstep, through the curriculum. So, the same students are together for every class. We talked some about the assets and liabilities of this kind of cohort association for teachers.

I am busily preparing for my online interview with adult educator Patricia Cranton. (See http://www.magnapubs.com/calendar/192.html for information about this March 25 Magna Online Seminar.) We’re going to be talking about transformative learning, but I’m trying to make sure that I’m conversant with all of her current research interests. She is into so many interesting areas! This morning I’m reading some of her work on teacher authenticity.

I love reading pedagogical literature. You never know what you will happen onto next. This afternoon I found an article in Pedagogy (it’s a pedagogical periodical in the field of English) written by a group of graduate students describing their experiences in a required professional development seminar on teaching literature. The article is full of insights, many wise beyond the limited teaching experience of the group, but I was particularly taken with how they described one of their assignments, which asked them to write (with annotated bibliography) a philosophy of teaching.

As usual, I’m working on a book. At the present moment I’m trying to write a positive and constructive chapter on those institutionally mandated student ratings. Believe me, it’s a struggle. Ratings are so misused and so misunderstood. Institutions use instruments created by political processes. Frequently they contain items unrelated to the research identified components of instruction that can be linked to learning outcomes. Administrators rank faculty and imagine that a teacher with a 6.12 overall score deserves a higher raise than someone with a 6.00 score. And faculty believe all manner of myths: that ratings measure popularity and that the easy course wins high scores, for starters.

Robert Tauber and Cathy Mester say in their book, Acting Lessons for Teachers, that if you do an ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) search on the word “enthusiasm” and combine it with “teaching” 716,000 citations come up. I didn’t try it so I can’t verify the claim, but as they note that’s a “staggering” number of citations that attests to the importance of enthusiasm in teaching.