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March, 2010
The Teaching Professor - March, 2010 - Full Issue PDF
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The Teaching Professor - March, 2010 - Full Audio MP3
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Keeping Office Hours Real in the Facebook Age
By Kiren Dosanjh Zucker, California State University, Northridge
Our students email us questions, they send us “instant messages,” and even “friend” us on Facebook. Yet those very same students who invite us to join their social network may not consider a visit during our office hours.
Debating: Beneficial for Students
Some instructional strategies have withstood the test of time. Take debating, for example. Protagoras first proposed it as an instructional strategy 2,400 years ago. In recent years, classroom debates appear to have fallen out of favor, or at least they’re not an instructional strategy regularly advocated in the pedagogical literature.
Banning Laptops from the Classroom
By Douglas Groothuis, Denver Seminar and Metropolitan State College
The classroom should be a consecrated place—a dedicated space for attending to ideas not normally addressed as ardently elsewhere. Strange, good, and serendipitous things happen there. Questions are newly formed, puzzlement gives way to intellectual pursuit, and insights arrive serendipitously.
Courseocentricism: New Word, New Idea
There’s a tacit rule that most college teachers abide by: I won’t mess with your course if you agree not to mess with mine. Gerald Graff observes and asks, “This rules suits the teacher, but how well does it serve students?” (p. 155)
Truly Collaborative Teaching
It’s not “serial teaching” or “a lot of little mini courses stuck together” or “sequenced solo teaching” as team teaching too often is, but rather teaching where “we are both planning, we are both making sure we understand the material as it needs to be presented, and we are both standing up there.”
Educating the Teacher: Thoughts on Teaching New Material
By John A. Dern, Temple University, PA
I have discovered over 18 years of teaching that one of the most difficult and rewarding parts of my job is figuring out how to teach new material. New material often presents challenges born of the teacher’s unfamiliarity with a text or a subject, but new material also provides a way for the teacher to grow and learn.
Student-led Garden Tours: Fertile Ground for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
By Valerie Bang-Jensen and Mark Lubkowitz, Saint Michaels College, VT
If you are like us, you find it important yet challenging to work interdisciplinarity and collaboration into your courses. We’d like to share our experiences in designing an authentic task that accomplishes both.
The Last Five Years
By Barbara Mezeske, Hope College, MI
Much is written today about new faculty and those in their midcareer years. The literature for newcomers is about how to teach, and for those who’ve been teaching for a while it’s about new strategies and keeping vital in the classroom. Those of us well past that professional midstage wonder why these groups get all the attention. What about those of us who are considerably older, who are pushing hard against the upper limits of midcareer, and who may have some of the same concerns about not drifting toward obsolescence or prematurely slinking off into some imaginary sunset where there are no students, exams, papers, departmental reports, or annual reviews to plague us. Isn’t staying intellectually alive and effective in the classroom just as much—or more—of an issue for those who can count on their fingers the number of semesters they have left?
