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August -September, 2008

The Teaching Professor - August -September, 2008 - Audio MP3
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The Teaching Professor - August-September, 2008 - Full issue PDF
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Teaching Classes That Meet in Blocks
By Mary Clement, Berry College, GA
In order to meet the needs of today’s students, colleges and universities are offering more courses in block time formats. These courses meet once a week for three hours, extended hours over fewer weeks, or on weekends. Typically, the students who take these courses are working full time, are interested in career advancement, and want classes that keep them engaged. As one student explained, “I want my degree, but I won’t sit through boring classes to get it. I work all day and then come to class at night. I attend the first session, evaluate the instructor, and then decide if I will even take the class.” How do we meet the needs of these students and maintain academic quality?

Striving for Academic Excellence
By Keith Starcher, Indiana Wesleyan University
Like all academics, I worry about standards and whether mine have slipped. Actually, I worry more about my students and the number of them who no longer see academic excellence as a goal worth pursuing. Many more seem to feel, as one student told me recently, “If I work hard, I deserve an A.” I wondered if there was a way I could use the first class session to help my students and myself recalibrate our “excellence meters.” Could I motivate them in a fun and engaging way to see excellence the way Rick Pitino, head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, sees excellence? “Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer,” Pitino says.

Poorly Designed Group Work
A student posted a rant about group work on my blog (http://teachingprofessor.blogspot.com. If you haven’t joined the blog, please feel welcome to. It’s free and, with the subscriber base growing, the posts are generating some interesting commentary). What the student says in the rant is not surprising. Most of us already know this—a lot of students really hate group work. Some of that is because not all learners find the group setting conducive to learning. But some is the result of poorly designed group activities and projects. Here are some common design flaws that compromise group functioning and thereby the learning potential of those in the group.

20 Questions about Writing Assignments
By E. Shelley Reid, George Mason University, VA
At the end of English composition, I ask students how what they’ve just learned in my class might be useful in their other classes. They’re often bemused and surprised to learn that professors in other courses care about their writing. To encourage them to take responsibility for succeeding in their future writing assignments, I hand out a list of 20 questions that they might ask to better understand “what the professor wants,” and thus continue to apply what we’ve been practicing.

Still More on Developing Reading Skills
If you regularly read this newsletter, you will know that in recent issues we’ve published a number of articles on students and college-level reading skills—more specifically, how we get students to devote the time and energy required to read college-level materials. Here’s more on the topic from an excellent article that does a particularly good job of framing the issues. It also offers an assignment that develops reading skills (and some evidence that it works).

Student Success Is in the Cards ... Or Is It?
By Karen Lightstone, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
I set out this academic year to try and make introductory managerial accounting a more effective learning experience for students by using a simple card system. For each new concept the students get a card, I write the basic concept on the board and how it behaves or what it is, and then I provide an example. Students keep these cards; they may refer to them when I offer illustrations from the chapter and use them for study outside of class. Students end up with eight to 10 cards by the end of the course. The cards divorce the ideas from the individual chapters and thereby enable students to apply the concepts to more complex business decisions.

Traffic Lights and Participation
Virtually all of us who work to promote interaction and dialogue in the classroom are interested in strategies that help us facilitate these exchanges. Here’s an intriguing set.

Statement of Purpose Assignment
Do you challenge students to think about why they’re taking a course? Most faculty are discouraged by the very common “because it’s required” response. Equally discouraging is what students hope to get out of a course. Sometimes they seem perplexed by the question! The answer is so obvious—they want an A. Bob Trudeau, a faculty member in political science at Providence College in Rhode Island, has developed an intriguing assignment that gets students beyond those easy answers. It’s an assignment that encourages students to think and write about why they are in a course.

Announcing The McGraw-Hill and The Teaching Professor Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award
We are pleased to announce that McGraw-Hill has joined The Teaching Professor to create an award for scholarly work on teaching and learning. An announcement about this new award was made at the 2008 Teaching Professor Conference in Orlando, Fla., and the first award will be given at the 2009 conference in Washington, D.C. Some details and specifics are still in the planning stages, but here’s some general information.