There are moments in a semester when teaching feels steady, even productive, and yet you feel less connected to the work than you would like. You are showing up, teaching your classes, and meeting expectations, but the deeper sense of meaning that brought you to
Summer flexibility presents a pedagogical paradox of sorts. On the one hand, summer is the perfect time to reflect on our teaching, change out required readings, fine-tune assignments, and generally modify course design. On the other hand, come the last day of the academic year,
Early in my career, I interpreted most classroom problems at face value. A disengaged student seemed unmotivated. Missing assignments looked like irresponsibility. Frustration during class activities appeared to reflect lack of effort. But after teaching across middle school, high school, and college classrooms while simultaneously
I have been teaching at the college and university level for the past 30 years, and for many of those years, I have taught introductory first-year courses. As I creep closer to retirement, I’ve been reflecting on how teaching first-years has challenged me over the
I was recently invited to write an essay about a pedagogy of joy, an approach to teaching that treats joy as part of learning. I had a visceral reaction and wanted to say, “No, thank you.” But I didn’t, even though I felt my body
Two of my past articles for The Teaching Professor describe different types of educational “moments”: teaching moments and critical moments. Although I have been in the classroom for nearly 35 years, I continue to seek out strategies, like these moments, to fine-tune my teaching. In
For many, Richard Feynman (1918–1988), the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned cultural icon, is the prototype of a creative genius (Gleick, 1992). Beyond physics, he became renowned for his impish personality, boundless curiosity, and adventurous spirit (Feynman, 1985). He was an avid proponent and communicator of
Every semester, we conclude our courses with grades, reflections, and the quiet hope that, somehow, what we have taught will show up later in our students’ lives, when they actually need the information, when it will actually count. In teacher education, that’s not wishful thinking.
A few semesters ago, I found myself caught in what I now call a fairness trap. Teaching qualitative research methods to over 150 undergraduates (equivalent to three sections), I tried to recreate the close mentoring I’d experienced during my doctoral training. I began meeting more
Not one. Not two. Eleven. That’s how many times my fellow panelists and I touted our university’s low faculty–student ratios during a recent session for prospective students. But how could we resist? Each time we invoked those magic numbers, parents smiled (“My child will be
