Higher Education Observer

Earlier I posted on this subject, and going over my research notes for the dissertation has led me to a further comment.  Just like in the Mommy Wars there is an implication that mothers who breastfeed, grow organic vegetables, homeschool, or whatever trendy thing is being advocated, that these mothers are better and love their children more, there is a strong implication that professors who do not lecture, who use active learning techniques, etc. are more committed to student learning and somehow more concerned about the humanity of the students or some such thing.  If you are on the NO LECTURE side of this issue, you are not going to win any friends who lecture by implying that they are not concerned about students.  Don't go there. Also, if you do not require writing in your classes, or you only require writing as process or reflection (that is, you do not grade for form or quality, only existence of the writing), tread very carefully when you are around...

I have posted two blogs on Defense of Lecturing.  Now I will take the other side of the argument—an expose or attack on lecturing. First, lecturing can be lazy.  Not in the sense that it doesn’t take a lot out of you and there isn’t any energy expended.  On the contrary, lecturing take a lot of physical effort, especially the way some of us do it.  I am quite active and animated.  I am known for it.  But I also tell my students that I could lecture in my sleep.  That’s an exaggeration, but not really.   I have given some of the lectures hundreds of times, at least.  It is human nature to default to the easy, and sometimes I cherish  and look forward to those day when I get to go in, give that lecture I know backwards and forwards, for which I have all the jokes and stories and timing down, and that I know is pretty effective and clear.  It gives me comfort, in a sense.  “I can do this.  They like me, I’m ...

http://blottheskrip.wordpress.com/2014/09/27/top-ten-writing-mistakes/

There are of course many arguments for and against lecturing. In interviewing more than twenty faculty members at my college, one of the main reasons for a dependence on lecturing was “so much material to cover.”  In some cases the covering of so much material is mandated by state standards or accreditation necessities; for example, Anatomy and Physiology, the bane of pre-nursing students.  Students cannot legitimately be expected to learn material that is not discussed in class.  Lecturing is an efficient way to do that, using visuals like PowerPoint, either provided by the textbook company or teacher-created. A second argument is that the students like it.  They see the professor as doing his or her job by showing up and “teaching” what will be on the test.  In talking to nursing professors, this was particularly the case.  Since there is a high stakes test for nursing students at the end of their course, it is vital for them that they be ready for the te...

This article also appears on my general interest blog, partsofspeaking.blogspot.com Before I begin this article, which may be considered a reflection, a polemic, or a diatribe, depending on the reader’s viewpoint, and which to be is an honest exploration of an important topic in higher education, I feel I should give my credentials for writing about this subject. If there is anything I know about, it is college teaching.  I have been doing it since  January 1978.  That is 37 years come January, and that is a long time by most accounts. Yes, I started at 22 (not kidding there).  I have taught in private colleges, technical and community colleges, a university, and a four-year state college.  In most cases, the institutions were more or less open-access. I have, by my accounting, taught over 20 different courses over the years.  I have also taught many of them in hybrid or online versions and developed a number of online/hybrid courses.  Here is my ...

As I wrote on my other blog, I am now pretty much a full-time caregiver for my mother.  Other than teaching my classes and trying to finish my doctorate, right now I don't have the time or opportunity to do much else.  Perhaps I will come back to this in a few months; college teaching and learning and faculty development are my life's work.  Please look at the archives for many helps on these subjects.  Until then, enjoy.

I think about fear a lot.  I think fear explains our lives a lot more than we let it. I teach public speaking; tomorrow night my class is giving their first speeches and I have gotten the anxious emails about it.  One thing I am good at is making a comfortable atmosphere; however, I think there is also something to be said for just throwing them into the water and letting them sink or swim.  They almost always swim; it might not be a pretty breaststroke that will get them the gold medal, but they make it. Some learning theorists encourage that viewpoint.  Even Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is somewhat along that line.  I am now reading Parker Palmer's and Arthur Zajonc's book The Heart of Higher Education , which is partially a defense of integrative education.  What is that?  It's trying to get away from classroom-based, textbook-based, banking model (I call it tea pitcher model) type of education.  One argument against these meth...

Good article in Inside Higher Ed about the closing of teaching and learning centers at colleges but also their upticks. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/30/some-teaching-and-learning-centers-have-closed-after-recession-field-growing-over#sthash.ingmsbVh.dpbs

As mentioned here or elsewhere, I am working through Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  It is a must read, but I don't think it would speak to young teachers, someone in their twenties.  It is for people who have taught at least a decade and have enough life experience for what he writes to resonate with them.  It is both a wise and spiritual book.  I hope to write half so good something about teaching  in the future, and I plan to use the book as a basis for a learning community in the fall, related to my dissertation. The chapter on fear and the Student from Hell so resonated with me that I am still in awe.  My students are fearful, and sometimes they hide it with bravado, rudeness, seclusion, avoidance.  I am fearful, too, stupidly of student evaluations.  So much is put on those that we good teachers are afraid to challenge.  I don't mean like the colleague who told his students to get their heads out of the a---. I mean to avoid p...

Parker Palmer writes:  We collaborate with the structures of separation because they promise to protect us against one of the deepest fears at the heart of being human--the fear of having a living encounter with alien "otherness," whether the other is a student, a colleague, a subject, or a self-dissenting voice within.  We fear encounters in which the others is free to be itself, to speak its own truth, to tell us what we may not wish to hear.  We want those encounters on or own terms, so that we can control their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of world and self."  (p. 37) This is a big answer to the previous post.

I have been enrolled in a doctoral program in adult education for almost two years now.  My gpa is 3.96 or so and I am ahead of all my cohort on the dissertation, which we are supposed to write during the classwork, a difficult process.  I am taking a day off today having spent the last two days at class and struggling with something. I did not expect this doctoral experience to change me as much as it has.  I have been in the classroom 35 years and have been taught to examine a lot of my assumptions.  I was always rather self-critical, so examining and questioning my professional practice is a good and welcome and rather natural thing.  However, there is only so much self-criticism one can endure until one feels like her self or his self is being sucked away.  So I end up backing off, being angry that I am expected to change, especially when the person asking me to change is hardly in a position to do so. One issue that has hit me this semester is the ...

I have taught college classes for thirty-five years.  Yikes.  I like to think I have learned a few things in that time.  One of these days I'll write it all down (and like a good academic, provide theoretical and evidence based support for it).  But today I'll focus on anecdotal data. When I came to my current position, I was told that I had to earn 4.6 or higher on my student evaluations to advance professionally.  I had always gotten 4.4 to 4.5 or so, and thought that was pretty good.  Certainly I wasn't expected to be perfect!  Yet some of our professors did get 5s, rather frequently. I balked at this like everyone else, but took on the challenge eventually--not willingly, but having to.  I did a lot of reading about the subject, although I doubt anyone could really read the volumes on it.  Five years ago I read a meta-analysis published in the late '90s on the subject, and at that time there were 3,000 academic articles on the subject....