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When you lecture, take a break!

When I work with faculty on improving their teaching, one of the areas that I constantly try to get them to improve is in their lecturing. Particularly in certain disciplines, lecturing is the primary instructional approach used by professors. Lecturing is probably the oldest teaching approach and can be effective. However, lecturing can also be done very poorly as the stereotype of the professor reading form the yellowed lecture notes illustrates. I try to convince faculty to include more active learning approaches into their classes and I find the pause procedure is an excellent vehicle for this. In today’s post, I want to share an excerpt from my book on college teaching (Teaching for Learning)  that describes the pause procedure and how to use it effectively in the college classroom.

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Another university president gets fired

Baylor, Ken Starr, and a presidency derailed

The situation at Baylor University in recent months is disturbing on many levels. The university president has been fired. A winning football coach is gone as well. Too many women have faced sexual assault and the university failed to act. Beyond the horrible facts of what happened at Baylor, I see a broader trend at work here. In today’s post, I want to share a column published in TribTalk, a publication from the Texas Tribune. My research assistant, Molly Ellis, and I discuss Baylor and our research into why university presidents get fired.

Photo by Callie Richmond
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Plight of the Regional Public University

For several decades now, state higher education policymakers have implemented regulations, policies, and legislation that created incentives for institutions to maximize their own prestige as well as the private economic benefit for students. The emphasis and hyper-attention paid to vocational and economic returns of higher education undercut the foundation of the liberal arts core as well as institutional diversity, as I’ve written about in the past. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education story about Western Illinois University and regional public universities more generally provide yet another clear example of how these policies are failing higher education, our country, and our students.

Photo credit: makeitmacomb.com

Colleges and universities of all stripes— but particularly regional universities— have been encouraged and some cases forced to pursue market-based strategies that led to revenue and prestige generation. 

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Are college students more brilliant? The grade inflation debate

Brilliant! I loved the series of Guinness commercials that made fun of the British affinity for using the word brilliant. It is hard not to love using brilliant and I often join in after only a few days in England (resulting in much ribbing from my colleagues). Of course, the issue is that if everything is brilliant- is anything? Brilliant used to mean exceptionally good, but now it has been watered down due to overuse. All of this leads to me think of the grade inflation debate in higher education and whether today’s college students are more brilliant than in the past.

“Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.”  — Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard University, 1984

The grade inflation debate is not new.  

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Obama on higher eduction and anti-intellectualism

It is graduation season which means politicians hitting the trail giving commencement addresses. Most of these aren’t particularly interesting and are often quite stupefying.  I thought President Obama’s speech at Rutgers University was an exception to this rule. I’ve been thinking a great deal about anti-intellectualism in our country and thought that the President addressed the issue quite well.  So for today’s post, I want to share a few key sections from his speech that I think should inspire and convict those of us working in the inherently intellectual business of higher education.

Photo credit: Mandel Ngan / AFP