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March, 2009

The Teaching Professor - March, 2009 - Full Issue Audio MP3
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Individual Ability and Group Work
One of the common objections to group work is that bright, capable students are held back when they share group activities and grades with students of lesser ability. This is of concern to teachers and students. Often very good students strongly oppose group work. They worry that an ineffective group with weak or nonproductive members will compromise their grades. Many openly express the belief that they can do the activity, project, paper, or presentation better on their own and would prefer doing it that way.

Learning Communities: Benefits Across the Board?
There is no question that higher education tends to get caught up in “fashionable” program innovations, and learning communities could certainly be considered an example. A great deal of research has established that, in terms of retention and persistence, first experiences in college are tremendously important.

Preparing Teaching Philosophy Statements
Although they are a fairly recent innovation, most faculty are familiar with teaching philosophy statements. Many have prepared them for job interviews, for promotion and tenure dossiers, for teaching awards, or for personal benefit. Teaching philosophy statements are narrative descriptions of “one’s conception of teaching, including the rationale for one’s teaching methods.

Six Causes of Resistance to Learning
Stephen Brookfield writes about students who are beyond being passive about learning—they just plain resist it. He suggests that teachers can’t respond successfully unless they are knowledgeable about the sources of resistance to learning. Here’s a sample of possibilities that appear in his book The Skillful Teacher.

No Time for Revision?
By Kevin Brown, Lee University, TN
The 2008 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement found that “about 47% of faculty members teaching lower division courses and 54% of those teaching upper-division courses thought it was important or very important for their students to write more than one draft of a paper.” It is troubling to note that less than half of the professors who teach first-year students believe that those students should revise their papers and that only slightly more than half of those teaching upper-division courses think similarly. Nonetheless, a significant number of professors think students should do more revision across their educational careers.

Going Global by Using Local
By Anne Cullen, Bond University, Queensland, Australia & Dennis C. McCornac, Anne Arundel Community College, MD
The effort by academic institutions to meet the demands of an increasingly global and complex economic environment requires educating students to succeed in the worldwide marketplace. Although the proliferation of study abroad opportunities for both students and faculty and the expansion of partnering arrangements and visiting lectureships are positive developments, the current economic situation may put a damper on the ability of faculty, students, and institutions to participate in these endeavors.

A Blog, a Physics Course, and a Change in Student Attitudes
Does it matter if students leave courses with a positive attitude toward the content area? Maybe successful acquisition of content is all that really matters. Maybe teachers don’t need to be concerned if students “liked” the content. As physics professors Duda and Garrett (reference below) point out, this is about more than whether or not students “liked,” in their case, physics. The positive attitudes toward the discipline that teachers need to cultivate “encompass an appreciation of how physicists think and operate; the value of physics as it applies to other fields, such as engineering, biology, and medicine; and the applicability of physics to everyday life.” (p. 1054)

Use Personal Essay Assignments to Encourage Substantive Discussion of Course Content
“Why are teachers afraid of sentences that begin with ‘I feel …’ or that draw on personal experience?” Margaret Mott asks, repeating a question she read in an essay early in her career. Most faculty don’t encourage students to use personal experience because it is seen as too subjective and without much intellectual substance. Mott has students in her political theory course write three personal essays. Her motivation derives partly from the need to “displace the preponderance of passivity I find in their essays.” (p. 207) Not only does the academy object to the personal, but students themselves have been trained to stay out of their writing. “High school students know from experience that the more they talk about themselves, the more will be taken away.” (p. 207)

Avoiding Mediocre Lab Reports with Creative Assignments
Robert Badger, a professor of geology, describes the lab reports he wrote as a student in an introductory geology class. “I wrote tired, uninspired drivel, merely recounting a vague version of what the professor or teaching assistant had recited, without trying to analyze for myself what it was I had actually observed.” (p. 58) He promised himself that if he ever became a teacher he would not subject his students to “such tedious and pointless exercises.” (p. 58) Badger did become a teacher, and he avoided what he had experienced by having field trips but dispensing with write-ups. What he discovered, though, was that students could not answer even basic essay questions about what they’d observed on the field trips. So he added the usual lab report, got the expected poor results, and knew he had to do something better.