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If everything went perfectly for your class this semester, there’s no need to read on, because you shouldn’t change anything. For the rest of us mortal instructors, there is rarely, if ever, such a thing as a perfect class. Teaching is a practice of constant iteration and improvement, never a destination.

The lecture has long been a topic of rich debate in the field of education. Questions about should we, or shouldn’t we lecture persist. I’d like to argue that it’s not quite so simple, and a reductionist approach to determining the value and use of lecturing eliminates insight into good pedagogical practice overall, and the real value of the tool itself as a mechanism to promote student learning.

Pure and simple, I love teaching using technology.  It gives me an opportunity to “be there” when a teachable moment occurs without having to be in the same place as my students.  It allows me to see beyond their eyes and into the minds of each of my learners.  And yes, it allows me to teach from the beach, the mountains, and from home when my family needs me.

Your muscles, brain, and course syllabus all have something in common.

You’ve just finished teaching your class for the day and head home. You sit down for dinner, and a loved one asks, “How was class today?”

How do you respond? The answer may be revealing.

How do you teach your students to function effectively in teams?

It is not news to anyone teaching in higher education that Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) are a hotly debated topic. Their validity and reliability are often called into question, particularly since they are typically the primary source of evidence used for merit and promotion decisions in regard to one’s teaching effectiveness.

At a recent pedagogy workshop, a senior faculty member gently pulled me aside. So as not to disturb his colleagues who were working on a prompt I had given them, he whispered, “This stuff is great. It really is. I’m going to use this in my class. But, what’s really concerning me right now is that I’m teaching a class of mostly freshman, mostly around 18-20 years old, and I’m 50 years older than they are!

- Pattern shifting is the active pursuit of uncovering new purposes and potentialities for engaging students in learning. A very simple re-ordering can reveal relatively easy methods to teach more from your strengths and more actively engage students in the class.

As we approach the end of another semester, it is common for students to turn in drafts of papers, projects, and assignments for some kind of review before the final product is due. It would be typical for a blog, then, to note something like the top 10 or top 5 ways to promote student development through feedback that both instructs and motivates.

With the possible exception of presentations, there are few things that happen in a student’s academic career that stress them out more than final exams. One source of frustration for both students and faculty alike is when faculty believe an exam has been written fairly and yet students have done poorly.

Oh, god, I'm going to quote Mr. Spock, from the episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?"

Dr. Miranda Jones: The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.

Spock: And the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.

I carried out an experiment in teaching Physics in a flipped environment:  students listened to my recorded lectures on their own schedule, and we did conceptual problems in the classroom, using clickers to facilitate peer instruction.  This left time in class for microlectures on topics in Unsolved Problems in Physics and Astrophysics — the beating heart of Physics as Physicists experience it.  A pool of ungraded quantitati

Summer is approaching, graduation is at hand, and on a campus like Berkeley, faculty colleagues are understandably relieved and excited…very excited.  No class. No office hours. No professional time split amongst priorities. It is research time.

“Learning from mistakes is probably the most familiar form of learning for every human being. Every time we make a mistake, i.e., we suffer from an inconvenience due to our behavior, we try to modify our knowledge about the world in order to avoid suffering again in the future for the same reason.“

-Giordana & Serra, 2001

Last year, a faculty member in a great state of dismay visited me. He had received his student mid-semester evaluations and they were, in his words, “disheartening.” He went on to tell me how brutal they were; how the students attacked some statements he made in class, questioned his feedback on work, and disliked the readings he selected. I asked him how many students were enrolled – 70 students.

Chagrin:  “Ugh, I have to learn another LMS?”

Procrastination:  “Develop my class first, worry about this later.  Wow, my bathroom sink really needs to be cleaned.”

It’s 2pm on a Tuesday, and as you walk into your classroom to set-up to teach, filing past the herd of students from the previous class making their way out, you overhear a couple students talking excitedly about the questions posed during the last hour. Another group of students shuffling out debates the best way to solve a particular equation.