Faculty can be very particular (even precious) about a course syllabus, but sometimes in all the wrong ways. Many view the syllabus as a firm contract and a laundry list of every particular variation and question that might ever occur to a student during the course of a semester. This was the rationale behind the […]
Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame, has written a fascinating and stark study of higher education. The short answer for why so many young people dislike college is that it’s too much like school and not enough like learning. The artifice of school has displaced our natural love of collaborative learning […]
The talk of assessment of student learning outcomes has well established the important connection between student learning outcomes and coursework. It is essential that coursework prepare students for and ultimately give them an opportunity to demonstrate and master. What has been overlooked has been the connection to outcomes and objectives—that is, how we teach what […]
Rick Magee is an associate professor of English at Sacred Heart. He won the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015 and has a reputation for being one of the most effective and most popular instructors on campus. I wanted to see what he was up to, so I could steal some of his best ideas. […]
James Lang, the author of four books and a regular contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education, has just published a remarkable new book on teaching and learning, called Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Lang, professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, takes his […]
Research consistently shows how a focus on students and learning is better than focusing on instructors and teaching. Here is an opinion piece from the New York Times on how learning is improved by a more engaged teaching style. The impact is true overall, but it’s more pronounced for women and minorities. What has always surprised me […]
