In This Issue Current Issue Archives

June-July, 2005

The Teaching Professor June-July Full Issue
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Top-of-Hour Break Renews Attention Span
By William R. Chaney, Purdue University, IN
It is 10 minutes before the end of class, and the mass of 375 students is beginning to get restless. Ballpoint pens retract, papers rustle, notebooks close, and book-bag zippers swoosh together. These disturbances, minor at first, ripple quickly across the room signaling that class is over and nothing else of consequence will occur. You envision quite a different conclusion for the 50-minute class. The final 10 minutes are for summarizing, showing relevance and connection to other course topics and answering questions that your passionate and enthusiastic presentation generated in the active minds of your students.

Bored and Ignored or Gained and Maintained: Role of Attention in Beginning Class
By Brenda M. Davis, Randolph-Macon College, VA
“Let’s begin today where we stopped last class.” How many college classes start this way every day? Some students attend by searching their notes or books to discover where the prior class concluded. But, for most learners, this opening fails to capture their attention, and they struggle to find some connections to the topic.

Active Learning: Reviewing the Research
As regularly noted in this newsletter, scholarship that summarizes, distills, and integrates educational research for practitioners is woefully absent in the pedagogical literature. We enthusiastically greet work that fills this void. We also attempt to highlight these summaries intriguingly so as to motivate you to add articles like these to your collection of material essential to successful teaching and learning.

A Brief Statement of My Teaching Philosophy
By Michael Glaser, Saint Mary’s College, MD
From time to time we publish teaching philosophy statements (usually shortened versions). Our goal is to encourage all of us to revisit the reasons why and the purposes behind our daily actions in the classroom. Michael Glaser shares his philosophy in a handout he distributes early in the course. He goes a step further when he spells out the implications of his philosophy for students.

Providing Notes: A Research Update
Some previous research (highlighted at various time in the newsletter) has reported that providing students with instructor-prepared notes improves their performance in class. More specifically, research has documented the value of providing partial notes so that students still must record some of the material for themselves. Some of this research has been criticized because of its experimental context — students were not using the notes across an entire semester in a course they were taking for credit.

Cheating: Can We Be Part of the Solution? A Response to Johnson
By Robert Dawson, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia
Johnson’s analysis of the role instructors may play in both encouraging and preventing cheating prompted me to respond with perspectives that agree and disagree with some of the points made in his article which appears in the March 2005 issue of this newsletter.

A Less Structured, More Learning-Centered Environment
Traditional teaching: "doing something to students." Learner-centered teaching: “doing something with students.” Learning-centered: being with students.” Do these differences seem semantic? To Jean Ramsey and Dale Fitzgibbons (reference below) they typify three modes of teaching, each located at a different place on a continuum. In the traditional mode, teachers pass on knowledge. Ramsey and Fitzgibbons note that most teachers have moved beyond this conception to a point on the continuum where they find themselves doing activities, exercises, leading discussions, and otherwise working to engage and involve students.

The Power of Feedback
I finished writing a book in February, and last night the three external reviews commissioned by the publisher arrived — Friday night, the last week of the semester when I am tired all the way to my core. Waves of anxiety hit me hard. I pause, should I read them now, or wait until tomorrow, or next week? I decide to take a quick look. I feel my heart pounding. Reviewer one seems to have missed the book’s points completely. The comments focus on side issues, small details. That’s troubling. Reviewer two is positive, positive. My spirits soar. I am relieved and exhilarated. The changes proposed make sense. I can do them. Reviewer three is much more critical. The book needs major reorganization. Its tone is wrong; too argumentative and didactic. I feel myself falling. It hurts when I land.

‘Lone Wolves’ on Student Teams
Lone Wolves are folks who don’t hold group process in high esteem. They don’t think others are particularly capable. They frequently think that their ideas are the best, and they find it hard to trust others to deliver “goods” that meet their standards.

Book Review: Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English
We don’t do a lot of book reviews in the Teaching Professor. It has always been our policy to review books we have read and can endorse for our diverse readership. The title of this book would seem to make a broad endorsement dubious: it is written by Shari J. Stenberg, an English professor, and it is about learning to teach English. And it may be that this book isn’t for everyone, but its contents are relevant far beyond just this field. See if these excerpts spark your interest.