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December, 2006

The Teaching Professor - December, 2006 - Full Audio MP3
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The Teaching Professor - December, 2006 - Full Issue PDF
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Living for the Lightbulb
By Aaron J. Nurick and David H. Carhart, - Bentley College, Mass.
We have all experienced it—that moment in the classroom when a student “gets it” and the lightbulb goes on. It’s that knowing smile or a look of surprise when the student’s entire body says “Aha! Now I see it!” It’s a response that delights teachers. We know that we have participated in a special moment and wish for more. But the lightbulb doesn’t go on as often as we would like; epiphanies do not happen on a daily basis. So we would like to explore the ways that teachers can create the conditions and remove the barriers so that more lightbulbs go on more often.

Berating Students for What They Don't Know
There is no question that the intellectual distance between faculty and students continues to widen. And there is equally no question that some college students today are missing fundamental knowledge and skills that will jeopardize their success in college and in life. The question is how do we show students where they are as compared with where they will be expected to be with a college degree? And how do we get them motivated to make that long journey? Is berating them the best way to get them going?

Librarians as Partners
By Marilyn H. Steinberg, MA College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and Kari Mofford, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Mass.
You are a librarian’s dream! You bring your students for research instruction sessions every semester. You schedule that session so that the librarian has time to plan a well-rounded lesson that your follow-up assignment reinforces. You say thank you, wish us well, and say that you’ll will see us next semester…done. Done? Did you know that the librarian can also be a partner throughout the semester to not only plan and update research assignments but also to help you assess them upon completion?

What Influences Student Attitudes toward a Course?
Drawing from work in their discipline, services marketing and management, two researchers extrapolated seven factors that might be significant determinants of student attitudes. Using a complex statistical model, the researchers tested the seven factors and found that four of them explained 77 percent of the variations in attitude toward the course: instructor, course topic, course execution, and the room (physical environment).

Teaching as an Amateur: Playing for the Love of Game
Amateurs play their sport for the sheer love of the game. It is true that most of us don’t teach for the money. And what is it about the teaching game that we love? Loui says we need to love our content and love our students.

An Easier Solution to a Thorny Problem: Trusting Students
By Hedwig Lee, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
An article in a previous issue of the Teaching Professor proposed a strategy to curb illegitimate student excuses concerning a death in their families. When students have missed a class or want extensions on papers and offer the excuse that a family member has died, Karen Eifler immediately sends a condolence card to a student’s family. She argued that if students are telling the truth, then the family is touched by her gesture of kindness; if students are lying, they have to explain things to their family members. This seems like a clever solution to a thorny problem: liars are “outed” and serve as an example to other students considering this fabrication, whereas truth tellers are provided with extra compassion from their professor in the form of a card. I’m not so sure about this strategy, even when students are telling the truth.

Understanding the Role of Intuition in Teaching
Even though teachers are regularly called upon to use their intuition, the knowledge it embodies is rarely articulated, and as a result even very skilled teachers are often at a loss to explain what they are doing and why. The fact that academic cultures prize reason and rationality compromises the perceived value of intuition even further. If knowledge cannot be explicated, does it in fact exist?

Not Just for Kicks: Discipline Pitfalls in the College Classroom
By Amy Getty, Grand View College, Iowa
My colleagues and I routinely exchange stories about students who talk in class inappropriately, sleep through most of the period, attend infrequently, refuse to complete work, do assignments haphazardly, and answer cell phones in class. Some of these behaviors are carryovers from high school; some are the direct result of students reveling in their newfound sense of freedom. Regrettably, some develop in “good” students when they are provoked by professor responses to these less than mature behaviors.

Cracking Tough Texts with Metaphor
By James R. Keating, Butler University, Ind.
There are excellent reasons to have students write about assigned readings. They need practice writing and should be challenged to explore and express their views by developing them in writing. As an instructor, I like to read student papers when their writers are engaged with an idea—energetic, emphatic, and fluent. But what about times when students have nothing to say and fill out several pages of lifeless prose to prove it? There is no joy in writing or reading work like that. Recently I’ve tried a new approach that aims to prepare students to write more compellingly about texts.

Should Students Have a Role in Setting Course Goals?
L.T. Benjamin advocates an approach to course goal setting that integrates the instructor's and students' perspectives "to create a course that is more meaningful to students and professor, to increase the satisfaction of all involved in the class on both sides of the lectern and to show students how important it is to become involved in their learning."