Teachers everywhere recognize the need to be clear. It’s one of those parts of effective instruction whose importance almost goes without saying. An unclear explanation causes confusion and prevents learning. By the 1970s, there were already more than 50 studies that explored and documented the
Some thoughts about change—not so much what to change, as the process of change, offered in light of its slow occurrence.
Yes, lecture is a good example. In a recent survey, 275 econ faculty who teach principles courses reported they lectured 70 percent of the
Are students taking their end-of-course evaluation responsibilities seriously? Many institutions ask them to evaluate every course and to do so at a time when they’re busy with final assignments and stressed about upcoming exams. Response rates have also fallen at many places that now have
Most student rating instruments include a question related to the feedback provided by the instructor. It may ask whether it was constructive, actionable, delivered in a timely manner, or some combination of these characteristics. Most teachers are conscientious about giving students feedback. Because they devote
“Good Teaching Is Like Good Sex,” proclaims the article title. Don’t stop reading just yet. If you do, you’ll miss a totally serious, insightful, actually downright amazing account of a teaching experience with profound effect.
Classroom observation instruments are not used all that regularly in higher education, but when they are, the focus tends to be on high-level abstractions (“The teacher was organized.”) or aggregated behaviors (“The teacher treated students with respect.”). Items like these are appropriate, but they do
The RateMyProfessor (RMP) site has been around now for more than a decade. As of 2013, it contained 14 million entries for more than 1.3 million professors from 7,000 schools. “Its express purpose is to serve as a resource for other users in their decision-making,
As a tenured full professor, I’m mostly scheduled for upper division and graduate courses. However, last year I taught two classes of traditional aged, first-year students. It was a good learning experience and provided me with new insights about beginning college students.
“Even measures with perfect validity can be rendered useless if they are interpreted incorrectly, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teaching evaluations are frequently the subject of unwarranted interpretations based on assumed levels of precision that they do not possess.” (p. 641) And now there’s some
Individual courses and degree programs give us the opportunity to move students along a developmental continuum. Content complexity grows across course sequences, as does student understanding of it. But are students growing as learners in the same way? Are we designing learning experiences so that
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