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RESOURCES
FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION
Newsletters:
In This Issue Current Issue Archives
January, 2006
The Teaching Professor - January 2006 - Full Issue
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Using Virtual Space to Enhance the Classroom
By Angelique Davi, Bentley College, Waltham, MA
For several semesters, I have required students to keep electronic journals. Given the emerging interest in blogs, this past semester, I replaced my Blackboard discussion board with a course weblog in my expository writing course. While the virtual spaces can be used in similar ways, Blackboard is designed as a course management site or a contained online learning space; weblogs, or blogs, tend to be websites maintained and published by individuals. These virtual spaces offer similar benefits to both students and faculty. How we integrate these spaces into our courses, I argue, is equally important. After a review of the benefits, I offer some tips for making the electronic journal a vital part of a student’s experience in any course.
Promoting Intellectual Development
As part of a long, two-part article that explores the intellectual development of science and engineering students, Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent propose an instructional model (or way of teaching) that promotes this growth. Among a number of conditions that they identify as being relevant to intellectual development, they propose particular kinds of problems for students to solve. Their list (summarized below) offers ideas relevant in any course where students solve problems.
Another Metaphor for Teaching Excellence: Machiavelli’s The Prince
By Paul Teverow, Missouri Southern State University
Donna Bowles recently offered some useful and stimulating ideas on how the film The Wizard of Oz suggests the “characteristics necessary for teaching excellence.” I’m sure that Professor Bowles prompted many of us to consider other classics that serve as sources of pedagogical inspiration. For me, it’s a text I use in several of my courses, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, a famous and short book on political theory and practice produced in Renaissance Italy.
How to Get Wet without Plunging In: Creative Ways to Start Class
By Patty Kohler, University of Central Arkansas
Starting a lecture can be challenging: getting everyone seated, attentive, and ready to move forward with the content can take several minutes. I have found that sometimes it feels abrupt and disjointed, especially when it has been a week since the last class meeting, so I’ve been working on strategies that help me get a class going without wasting time and that get all the students engaged and ready to learn. I now begin each lesson with a creative review of the last week’s materials.
How to Handle Student Excuses
“Grandpa’s heart exploded, but he’s fine now,” one student reported the morning after missing a scheduled exam. “I caught dyslexia from another student last semester,” responded another when his teacher asked him about all the spelling mistakes in his paper. And then there was the pet rabbit that swallowed a needle on the day of the big group presentation. Excuses like these are so preposterous that they can’t help but make us laugh, but dealing with them is no laughing matter.
Better Understanding the Group Exam Experience
The debate continues: is it fair and appropriate to give individual students a group grade based on the performance of the whole group? Experts stand on both sides of the issue. For individuals considering the use of group grades, that decision needs to take into account how students perceive the group exam experience. The study referenced below explores a number of relevant student perceptions.
Teaching, Research, and Salary
In the early 1990s, higher education researcher James Fairweather used data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (an annual survey sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics) to explore relationships between teaching, research and faculty pay. Five years after this first analysis Fairweather decided to repeat the study to see if “the decade-long push for greater commitment to teaching and learning” (p. 403) was being reflected in faculty pay. He wondered whether “the monetary value of teaching [had] increased” in the intervening five years and whether kind of institution (as per the Carnegie classification scheme) made a difference.
