Resources

We describe the development, implementation, and assessment of a faculty study group program designed to foster teaching as a reflective, collaborative activity within a research university. Conceived within conceptual frameworks that challenge technical/rationalist approaches to faculty development, the program was successful in creating opportunities for faculty of different disciplines, age groups, ranks, and teaching experience to establish productive discourse communities around their own teaching. Our experience shows that such programs require careful thought and planning, which we detail here, and that faculty even in research oriented institutions can be captured by the “good problem” that teaching represents.

This report examines the potential revolution in U.S. higher education public policies that require improved student learning. This revolution includes numerous teaching innovations activities that were initiated and sustained by external pressures and politically astute reformers. The report notes the criticism of U.S. elementary and secondary education and discusses how that criticism has spilled over into higher education. It examines reports which present the view that higher education is in deep need of reform. Faced with externally driven assessment and accountability movements, reformers have contended that the way to protect institutional autonomy from encroachment by external agencies is to focus on the importance of teaching and learning. Brief excerpts are presented from six voices of reform (Alexander Astin; Derek Bok and Richard Light; Ernest L. Boyer; K. Patricia Cross; and Lee Shulman) that highlight their vision of how to improve teaching and learning. Understanding that the assessment movement began as a drive for accountability at the national and state levels, rather than as local campus initiatives to improve teaching and learning, the paper offers insights on why major reform efforts were framed as demands that colleges and universities show better performance. The report concludes by examining the dilemmas that educational reformers face.

A summary of the findings of a survey of 765 students at Wright State University on what students found to be the most annoying behaviors by other students in order of importance, and tips on how to deal with those classroom annoyances!

The "Heeding New Voices" study, a year-long series of structured interviews with new faculty and graduate students aspiring to be faculty members around the country, sought both to give voice to those who are just beginning their academic careers and to provide guidance for the senior faculty, chairs, deans, and others in higher education responsible for shaping the professoriate of the future. This booklet, drawn in part from the study's findings, includes: (1) ten principles of good practice; (2) inventories to prompt department chairs, senior colleagues, and other academic leaders to examine their individual and institutional practices; and (3) examples of concrete and innovative approaches to good practice being tried out now in a variety of institutional settings. The principles reflect the three categories of stated need from the "Heeding New Voices" interviews: improving review and tenure processes (principles 1-4), encouraging positive relations with colleagues and students (principles 5-7), and easing stresses of time and balance (principles 8-10). (Contains 13 references). (EV)

Grading class participation signals students the kind of learning and thinking an instructor values. This chapter describes three models of class participation, several models for assessment including a sample rubric, problems with assessing classroom participation, and strategies for overcoming these problems.