Joshua Kim asks, "Is there really a war on lecturing going on across higher ed?  Do learning professionals want to kill the lecture? Read Christine Gross-Loh’s Atlantic piece, Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?, and you would be forgiven in thinking that there is and that we do. The anti-lecture cadre is characterized as comparing the traditional lecture to "bloodletting—an outdated practice that has long been in need of radical reform". This story makes for a neat argument. Who has not experienced the power of a transformative lecture?  Who would not support the need for professors to “model the art of argument”? And who is not critical of the tendency of educational pundits and administrators to blindly follow the latest educational fads? Let me be very clear.  There exists no campaign - no organized plot or plan - to eliminate the college lecture.  There is a movement across many schools to improve learning.  The lecture is, and always will be, part of the mix of a rich and varied learning ecosystem." Continue reading here.

Now that you’ve finished assessing your students, it’s time to turn the assessment process around by looking in the mirror. If you limped across the finish line last semester, it may be time to identify some new strategies for self-care. In our “Tending the Teacher” session at the recent Teaching Professor Conference in Washington, D.C., we presented a menu of ideas to help faculty design a balanced and productive work life.  Here are our top tips.

Aubree Evans writes, "Let’s face it, most faculty were good students and always did well in school. For students, having a professor who is adept at learning can be inspiring. But what if academic work comes so naturally to faculty that they have trouble relating to the average student? I’ve worked with several faculty members who fall into this category. “Rose,” a business professor, stands out in my memory. When I suggested that she break her online course into modules to make the weekly tasks more manageable for students, she was baffled. “Everything is in the syllabus!” she responded. She then explained that when she was in college, she began each course by carefully reading the syllabus and organizing the assignments into a schedule that she diligently followed throughout the semester. It didn’t make sense to Rose to repeat that information again in modules. When I suggested that school must have come easily to her, she agreed. However, our university serves many students who don’t have much experience with academic learning strategies that may come naturally to faculty." Continue reading here.

CREATING DYNAMIC LECTURES
Over the last 25 years, traditional lectures have taken a beating often portrayed as bad pedagogy. While some of the criticism is warranted, there are ways you can take your lecture-based learning experience and infuse it with active learning methods that promote student success. That is what the upcoming faculty professional development session is all about on March 17. Come and hear about the latest research, like Linda Nilson's self-regulated learners approach, that you can use to deepen your students recall and learning. The session begins at 3:00 pm and will be held in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building) at BRCC-Mid City. Register now.

MORE EFFORT CAN LEAD TO BETTER LEARNING
Effort and habit are instrumental to learning and writing, but they are often dimly lit in our grading systems according to Dr. Gary Hafer. He says that light needs to brighten with the help of new research and popular literature that highlight how essential habit, effort, and perseverance are to learning. "I’ve used an effort-aware grading system in my teaching for some time now, a B-grading contract that locks hardworking students into a minimum final grade of B. For grades rising above B, the quality of the writing is the focus (the product), but only for students who fulfill the contract (the process). I’ve become a proponent of the “Contract for B,” first proposed by Peter Elbow, because I like how it encourages students to experiment with their college writing in new and novel ways. As experts in our own disciplines, we can write stipulations of the contract to identify how and what we see prolific writers do in our disciplines. Even habits such as writing daily and talking about their writing in specific ways are tasks that students can achieve no matter their writing proficiency. Moreover, it’s important for students to read in the syllabus that 'any student who works really, really hard can achieve these tasks because they are habits that define a process.'”Continue reading his article here.

WE CAN'T IGNORE STUDENT'S REALITY
Joshua Block's latest post on the Edutopia blog  reminds us to understand where our students have been before we help them to move forward. He writes, "At their best, schools and classrooms affirm the power of community and what it means to be human. Teaching is complex work, and the challenges make it all too easy for teachers to lose focus of a greater vision for students and for society. Celebrating the potential of young people and the power of democratic education also means acknowledging and understanding the different ways that our society falls short." Continue reading his post here.