I have a brown wicker chair on my back porch. It is nestled in a little nook, shaded by the overhang of my roof and the foliage of Douglas firs and oaks. My neighbor’s water features, two little fountains and streams, gently murmur. One
When I started teaching, I had phenomenal mentors. I could ring up Paul, an English prof, and inquire about handling a student’s lie, and he’d help me identify the options. I could share my student evals with Jerry, a chemist, and he’d help me
A junior colleague asked me whether teaching for many years made me thicker skinned. They wondered whether reading student evaluations gets easier with time.
I was reminded of an essay by Stephen Marche (2023) on writers and the reviews they receive. Marche recounts the
The intent of professional development is to help professors become better teachers, but it is sometimes unclear what efforts bring the most improvement. Research has consistently identified several best practices in teacher professional development. We’ll address three of those practices here: focus, duration, and collaboration
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I was just beginning my teaching career, I had one clear goal on the first day of class: scare the living crap out of my students.
I’m exaggerating, but only a little. And while I’m tempted to say,
Summer is a great time for reflection. Most faculty are on nine-month contracts, which somewhat reduces what they have to do (though not what they want or need to do). Often, and especially if you are someone with a heavy teaching load during the academic
Why this article is worth discussing: For most teachers, change keeps their courses fresh and invigorated. It’s an antidote to all about teaching that doesn’t change: content fundamentals, courses taught, passive students, exams, assignments, and grading—a list we can polish off with committee work. Despite
Most teaching careers last for years; for many of us, a lifetime. With noses to the grindstone, we don’t usually take stock of where we are in light of where we’ve been. We know that we aren’t teaching as we did in the beginning. The
If you teach, you know about learning outcomes. Unless you inherited your courses from someone else, you’ve developed lists of them. You’ve probably had to submit these lists to the administration to be reviewed and possibly revised. You might have been asked to map these
Teaching awards have many fans; I’m not among them. Nancy Chism’s analysis of 144 awards at 85 institutions (one of the few systematic reviews conducted) identifies one of the reasons teaching awards are overrated: “It is somewhat startling to observe that for a little more
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