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December 2004

Full December 2004 issue of The Teaching Professor in PDF format
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An Eloquent, Insightful Teaching Philosophy Statement
By Barbara Licklider
From time to time we publish teaching philosophy statements. Some not only articulately capture beliefs about teaching, they do so eloquently and with an uncommon level of insight. Here’s an example from Barbara Licklider, who teaches education and leadership courses.

Respect and Disrespect in Class
When students feel respected, they are more motivated, committed to the course, and likely to learn. And most faculty aspire to treat students with respect. The rub revolves around how respect (and its counterpart, disrespect) ends up being defined behaviorally. What do faculty do that conveys that they value students, and what do they do that communicates disrespect?

Should We Require Attendance?
I’ve been thinking a lot about attendance lately. What got me started was a group of students attending a poetry reading sponsored by our local Literary Arts Series. It’s a wonderful series that brings to campus lots of different poets — some famous; some not so — who share a range of material. In addition to us regulars there are always a few students at the readings, but most are there for points, not for poetry. They get extra credit for writing a reaction paper.

Online Lecture Notes Can Aid Student Learning
By Ryan J. Zerr
Thinking back on my days as a student, I can recall classes where it was all I could do to get the day’s information down on paper. I was so busy transcribing the lecture that there was no time to think about what was being said or participate in any meaningful way. After class I would work to decipher what had been said, and then there would be the questions I wished I had thought of in class. Once I started teaching, I worried that some of my students might be falling into this same trap.

Problem-Based Learning: One Set of Lessons Learned
Because problem-based learning has come to mean so many different things, it is best to begin with a description. Rather than starting with content, PBL begins with a problem. Rather than posing problems with clear-cut, right answers, PBL presents students with less well-structure problems to which there are no single solutions. It is a learner-centered, not content- or instructor-centered approach. It challenges learners to become increasingly responsible for their own learning.

Grades, Money and the Economic Orientation to Education
Economic metaphors abound in higher education. And we’ve dealt with our share in the newsletter. The discussion of students as customers, as clients and education as a product has occurred in these columns more than once. Your editor felt that this was one of those topics we’d exhausted; she was wrong (again).

Using Online Discussion Forums for Minute Papers
By Debra Vredenburg
Most of us are familiar with the informal assessment tool called the minute paper in which write a short narrative about what they have learned about a particular topic covered in class. Many faculty use the minute paper at the end of a class period in order to gauge student understanding of the material. But there have been many successful modifications of the basic strategy. A number of them are reported in the well-known book Classroom Assessment Techniques by Tom Angelo and Pat Cross, who first proposed the technique.

Assessing the ABCs: Online Tools
By Laima Rastenis
At the beginning of a new class, a major area of concern for most teachers is attitude: Do the students like, hate, or don’t care about the subject? About a third of the way into the class, another question arises: Are the students using the textbook in a way that reinforces the material presented in class — are they even using the textbook at all? And lastly, how does the teacher demonstrate to students that grades have been compiled in a fair and equitable way.

Engaging Students in the Learning Process: What Faculty Can Do?
In the pedagogical literature, one regularly finds lists that seek to sum and distill the essence of successful teaching, to offer all the advice teachers need in a few over-arching principles. The objective is noble and difficult to achieve. Can all the complexities and vagrancies of teaching be so compressed? Can lists based on the experience of one be representative of the experiences of all? But still the lists are helpful. They return us to the basics and call us to confront the details of our own teaching. This article contains condensed and abbreviated versions of two such lists.