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August-September, 2006

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7 Strategies for Enlisting Experts
By Pamela den Ouden and Tanya Helton, Northern Lights College, British Columbia, Canada
Years ago, as a high school graduate applying for a college scholarship, I (Tanya) tried an innovative research strategy. I was investigating the case of a Canadian man who was questionably convicted of murder. I decided to call his mother and ask about the defense’s evidence. She answered all my questions and sent a box of materials that convinced me of his innocence. I won the scholarship, and years later, after 23 years in jail, David Milgaard was freed. Now I find my boldness amazing, but I learned a lesson we’ve both applied in our teaching. A lot can happen when you dare to ask an expert.

Faculty and Diversity-Related Course Content
Experience and evidence now confirm that, when present, material that highlights differences does have positive effects on a number of learning outcomes. Control of the curriculum remains in faculty hands—both collectively, in terms of course and program approval processes, and individually, in terms of daily decisions about what to teach. As a result, the success of efforts to make curricula more diverse depends to a large degree on faculty willingness to incorporate these materials.

Teaching Problem Solving: A Case with Intriguing Results
Those in math and science are especially committed to teaching their students good problem-solving skills. They do so believing that those habits of the mind will enable students to successfully solve problems for years to come. Additionally, most science teachers now recognize that students do not acquire these skills as well by osmosis, by simply being in the presence of a problem solver who uses them. They need to be taught the skills explicitly, and then they need the opportunity to practice those skills repeatedly. This way, effective problem-solving skills become habituated—a fixed part of how students approach every problem.

10 Articles that Sustain Me
Someone asked me at the recent Teaching Professor Conference how many articles on teaching and learning I may have read. I can’t imagine. We’ve be publishing the Teaching Professor newsletter for almost 20 years now, and for every issue I read a gaggle of pieces in my search to find the best ones to highlight. I have a four-drawer filing cabinet in my office into which I cannot cram another file—it’s a good thing many of the articles now exist in electronic formats. I have read a lot.

Small Group Discussion Tasks
Many students don’t greet with much enthusiasm teachers’ efforts to have them work in groups. They may not state their objections verbally, but the nonverbal reactions are eloquent. They just sit there; only with much urging do they look at those sitting nearby and move minimally in the direction of getting themselves seated together as a group. This lack of enthusiasm is at some level a recognition that it is so much easier to sit there and write down the teacher’s answers. The resistance also derives from previous experiences in groups where nothing or very little happened. Often very little happens in groups because students don’t tackle the tasks with much enthusiasm—a kind of vicious cycle develops here—but group ineffectiveness may be the product of poorly designed group tasks as well. A carefully thought out, creative, and purposeful task can impact student passivity and engender much more positive feelings about group work.

7 Strategies to Enhance Video Use in the College Classroom
By Kim Richardson and Fay Glosenger, Juniata College, Pennsylvania
In an effort to improve instruction, educators increasingly turn to multimedia materials, such as video, to enhance student motivation and learning. However, how those media are used often determines their effectiveness.

Three Years and Counting
By Keith Starcher, Geneva College, Pennsylvania
The spring semester is over. Final grades are posted, and committee meetings are on summer hiatus. And so ends my third year, sixth semester, and 33rd month as a college faculty member. It’s been an eye-opening experience for me and one that has prompted these conclusions about teaching.

Alignment: A Model that Responds to Teaching Tensions
How do instructors balance demands to make courses challenging and at the same time make them accessible to students? How do instructors find a way to be informal and friendly with students at the same time they maintain proper authority and professional distance? How do instructors simultaneously meet the needs of learners who learn well in groups and those who learn better on their own? Donald Wulff believes that effective teaching rests on the ability to respond to tensions that are inherently a part of interactions between the professor, students, and context. Good teachers know how to make adjustments between competing demands—they “align” their instruction so that learning is achieved.