October, 2009

The Teaching Professor - October, 2009 - Full Audio MP3
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The Teaching Professor - October, 2009 - Full Issue PDF
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Psychological Perspectives on Managing Classroom Conflict
By Jim Guinee, University of Central Arkansas
For the past 10 years I’ve given a presentation on managing classroom conflict to new faculty at my institution. I’m a psychologist, so that’s the unique perspective I offer. Throughout the presentation I emphasize the need to analyze “cognitive errors,” which I define as the faulty assumptions or misinterpretations commonly made by new (and not so new) faculty.

Modeling Stupidity
By Matthew Fleenor, Roanoke College, VA
I’ve just finished reading a 2008 essay by Martin Schwartz that was published in the Journal of Cell Science. It’s a piece regarding the “importance of stupidity” when doing research in the sciences. Schwartz argues that during his graduate research in the sciences, “the crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.” As an assistant professor at an undergraduate college that encourages student research, I’ve wondered whether I should be conveying the sense of vastness regarding what I do not know.

Teaching Risk-Taking in College Classrooms
By E. Shelley Reid, George Mason University, VA
Many of my writing students are conservative learners: they worry about grades and want to “play it safe,” they don’t take time to imagine alternatives, or they have low skill or confidence levels that reduce their abilities to try new things. And sometimes my own teaching or grading practices undermine my invitations to take the intellectual risks that are crucial to student learning.

Five Tips to Help Guest Lecturers Succeed
By Sandra Allen, Columbia College, IL
There are only two types of guest lecturers: those who are effective and those who aren’t. In general, we invite guest lecturers to extend the students’ horizons and broaden their perspective. We also invite guests who augment our own store of professional information and impart real-world knowledge. But how many of us have sat in embarrassment as the guest lecturer veered off topic or shared inappropriate anecdotes and outdated war stories?

Drill and Practice
By Larry D. Spence, Penn State University
The best expert performances, whether of athletes, musicians, chess players, surgeons, or writers, are creative and adaptive and executed with compelling grace. That requires deliberate practice, an idea based on the research of Anders Ericsson and associates. They found that expert performances in a wide range of arenas required intense exercises focused on finding and correcting minute mistakes. In practicing deliberately, students do not just repeat, but correct errors through experiments and problem-solving. The most effective teachers and coaches work to induce and amplify mistakes by disturbing repetition.

Writing Comments That Lead to Learning
By Susan M. Taylor, Andrew University, MI
Instructors who require papers spend a good deal of time emphasizing the importance of audience and purpose in writing. Writers who remember their readers and their writing objectives are much more likely to use good judgment about the decisions that go into creating an effective piece of writing. This is equally true of the comments instructors write on students’ papers. I’d like to share some suggestions, some of which I learned the hard way.