Bloom's Sixth

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…

AUSTIN, Texas – How do students view effective teaching? They offer a partial answer each semester when they fill out end-of-course teaching surveys. Thoughtful comments from students can help instructors adapt assignments and approaches to instruction in their classes. Unfortunately, those surveys emphasize a ratings scale rather than written feedback, squeezing out the nuance. Christina Ormsbee and Shane Robinson of Oklahoma State explain results of a qualitative survey of student views of teaching at their university. To address that, staff members from the …

By Doug Ward Matthew Ohland talks confidently about the best ways to form student teams. In a gregarious baritone punctuated by frequent, genuine laughs, he freely shares the wisdom he has gained from leading development of a team creation tool called CATME and from studying the dynamics of teams for more than two decades. Ohland, a professor of engineering education at Purdue, visited KU recently and spoke with faculty…

“What just happened?” Carl Luchies asked his graduate teaching assistant.  They stood at the front of a lecture hall in early 2013, watching as 120 normally subdued engineering undergraduates burst into spontaneous conversation. Luchies, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, had just given the students a problem to work on and told them it was a collaborative quiz due at the end of class. Students could work with anyone in the room, he said. “Anyone?” they asked. Carl Luchies works with a student in a graduate-level biomechanics class Anyone, he said. They could move…

Innovation, meet frustration. I’ve written frequently about how the lack of a reward system hampers (if not quashes) attempts to improve teaching and learning, especially at research universities.  A new survey only reinforces that short-sighted approach. The survey was conducted by the…

Learning matters. That may seem like a truism in the world of education – at least it should be – but it isn’t. All too often, schools and teachers, colleges and professors worry more about covering the right material than helping students learn. They put information above application. They emphasize the what rather than the why and the how. In an essay in Inside Higher Ed, Stephen Crew of Samford University makes an excellent case for…