One of the complaints that my students hear from their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) friends is that communication is such an “easy” discipline. In the first week or two of my Communication Theory and Theory and Research classes, we pretty quickly work on refuting that notion. We talk about how even the “simplest”…
Read More Polymaths and the Communication DisciplineSome of my former teaching assistants would laugh because my desk is relatively clean right now. In addition to the things you would expect (file drawers, tissues), there are a couple of other things I keep on my desk to remind me about various things: Yes, I’ve been known to like the Peanuts cartoon strip…
Read More What’s sitting on my desk now…Or what happened when I spent an afternoon reviewing all of the classes in my department…. The perfect pre-Christmas nerdy project: if I could reorganize all of our classes with different numbers, how would I do it? And why do it in the first place? The answer to the latter question actually comes from something…
Read More Making course numbers mean somethingAnd what do a couple of Research 1 schools have to teach those of us at liberal arts schools? I’ve been trying to update our department’s annual Individual Faculty Report (IFR) to make it easier to understand. It’s forced me to think more about what makes for an effective teacher. Yes, there are lots of…
Read More How do we evaluate college teaching…