savageinfidel

  In my previous blog posting, I talked about the creation of faculty learning communities as a way to generate conversation about various aspects of teaching/learning/education.    At that time, I brought up one of my favorite topics.    If you have read this blog for long, you are aware that I am a firm believer that the way you test will strongly influence the way your students learn.    If you want to create a different class environment, you need to test differently. Therefore, in discussing faculty learning communities, I strongly feel that every aspect of testing should be a topic of serious conversation by people who want to become better teachers. So, today, I have a question for you.    I would bet it is a question that you have never been asked before no matter how long you have taught.    And, I would argue that it is a question we should be asking all the time.    In fact, I think we should have a national con...

Assume someone offered you a million dollars to become one of the great college teachers in the world.   Given that much incentive, how would you approach the challenge?    Well, my plan would be to break teaching down into all of its many basic components and study each one very carefully – looking for ways to make it better.   I think you build a better machine by taking it apart so that you can analyze the individual pieces and try to improve each one.    However, over the years, I have never actually had anyone suggest this approach as a way of becoming a better teacher.    Improvement in teaching is more often talked about in generic ways.    My thought is that you need to select one specific component of your teaching and then focus on it for a while.    How can I do this better?    In fact, there have been many semesters over my teaching career where I spent the entire time trying to improve one particular aspe...

Sunday morning, my wife informed me that there was an article in the newspaper that I was really going to find interesting.    My wife knows me well so I was immediately intrigued.    The article was by Charles F. Bryan, Jr. and was titled “What Makes Great Teachers Great?”   And, yes, I was certainly interested. I found a lot about this essay to be very insightful.     I was especially interested to note that it was not written by a faculty member or by an administrator.    It was written by one of the leaders of a consulting firm.    Often, I believe, we get too close to college education to see it clearly.    I liked the idea here of having an outsider come in and study teaching with fresh eyes in order to provide his vision of what makes a great teacher. Here, the author identifies seven common traits of great teaching.    So, I have an assignment for you.   Read about these traits and then give yourse...

In my previous blog entry, I responded to a student from Florida who wrote in about the potentially devastating results of a bad first test.    As often happens with me, I have spent a lot of time since then thinking about how I could better prevent my own students from being trapped by the results of that first test.    I do not want my students to come to accept that they are just C or D students and have no possible way to improve.    I too often hear “well, I made a low C on that first test; I guess I’m destined to do poorly in this class.”    That’s nonsense.    I want them to fight back.    One test grade is just one test grade.    But, we are all human and much of our self-image is based on what happens to us right now.   A lot of success in life comes from having confidence and a bad first test grade can kill anyone’s confidence.    How do you avoid ruining a student’s confidence as a result...

  If you have followed my blog postings over the years, you know that I have several obsessions about teaching.    (1) – I believe in having a lot of communications with my students.   Whether it is love, marriage, or a college class, things go better with communication.    To the teacher, everything makes sense.    Too often, to the students, everything is a mystery.    I want to cut out as much of that mystery as possible.   I think students respond well when they understand what is expected of them. (2) – I believe in honest and frank communication.    College students are adults.   I never see any reason to feed them a bunch of nonsense.    If you aren’t going to tell them the truth, you would be better off not to have the communication.    I think you should stress the good as well as the bad.   No one wants to get praise all the time and no one wants to hear how bad they are all t...

I began giving teaching presentations about 10-12 years ago.    As I have said many times, I enjoyed that experience immensely because it forced me to spend serious time thinking more deeply about my own teaching.    I cannot begin to guess the number of times in the last few years that I have asked myself: --What really happened in class today?    --Why didn’t this work? --How should I have changed what I did? --What was wrong with that particular question? --Why did the class seem unorganized? --How did I manage to confuse so many students in that discussion? All those questions eventually led me to begin writing about teaching and now I am up to over 250 pages.    And, I am still asking questions and still learning. One of the very first teaching concepts that I ever developed for myself was “the learning triangle.”    I remember standing in front of 100 or so brilliant professors one day a number of years ago in one of my very firs...

I wrote my first entry for this blog on January 7, 2010.    At that time, I expected to write 5 or 10 essays.    I thought I might get a few hundreds readers.    I had one goal in mind:    to get more teachers talking about teaching.   Personally, I don’t think we come close to having enough serious conversations about the challenges and fun of being teachers and I wanted to push people in that direction.    I just think we need a lot more exchange of ideas if we are going to meet the educational problems of today. Well, this is now my 159 th posting on this blog and there have been more than 72,000 page views over the past three years.    I very much appreciate everyone who helps to spread the word by mentioning the blog to someone else.    The goal never changes – to get people talking about their teaching.    Education is serious business.    It is not a job to be taken lightly.   ...

Happy holidays to all the teachers out there.    This blog just went over 67,800 page views.    I have been thrilled throughout the year to have the chance to interact with so many wonderful educators.    ** When I give teaching presentations around the country, I am often asked how my teaching has changed during the past 42 years.    Because I stress working for 5 percent improvement each year, that particular question is certainly a legitimate one.    Invariably someone will jump up and ask:    Okay, how are you managing to improve over time? I actually have a couple of different answers for that question.    But, there is one response that I always give:    During the past decade, I have come to spend a lot more time writing my test questions.    I used to throw tests together hurridly with one goal:    to be fair.    Now, though, I view testing as a much more important ...