Bloom's Sixth

Martha Oakley couldn’t ignore the data. The statistics about student success in her discipline were damning, and the success rates elsewhere were just as troubling: Martha Oakley, a professor of chemistry and associate vice provost at Indiana University, speaks at Beren Auditorium on the KU campus. Women do worse than men in STEM courses but do better than men in other university courses. Students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students have lower success rates than women. The richer students’ parents are, the higher the students’ GPAs are. “We have no problem…

The intellectual work that goes into teaching often goes unnoticed. All too often, departments rely on simple lists of classes and scores from student surveys of teaching to “evaluate” instructors. I put “evaluate” in quotation marks because those list-heavy reviews look only at surface-level numerical information and ignore the real work that goes into making teaching effective, engaging, and meaningful. Debby Hudson via Unsplash An annual evaluation is a great time for instructors to document the substantial intellectual work of teaching and for evaluators to put that work front and…

The recent (Re)imagining Humanities Teaching conference (PDF) offered a template for the future of teaching in higher education. With its emphasis on teaching as a scholarly activity, the conference challenged participants to find effective ways to document student learning, to build and maintain strong communities around teaching, and to approach courses as perpetual works in progress that adapt to the needs of students. Pat Hutchings speaks during a plenary session at the (Re)imagining Humanities…