Student Guide Corner

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that one of my primary recommendations for improved teaching is the �Three E�s.�   Experiment, Evaluate, and Evolve.   I am not sure anyone can become a better teacher if they don�t take this path in some form.    For that reason, I am always a bit surprised that I don�t have more people coming up to me to tell me about their teaching experiments.  Oh sure, I get a few emails now and then.  But never as many as I would like.  I think all teachers should be bubbling with excitement (my fourth E) over their current attempts to improve teaching.  Every college campus should be an incubator for wonderful new teaching ideas.   Think how education in this world would improve immediately and dramatically if all campuses served as incubators for innovative new teaching ideas.  Does your campus qualify?  If so, let me know. Why don�t we experiment more?   I could...

Repeat of My Earlier Invitation:   If you are attending the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association this summer in Chicago, I will be participating in two different panel presentations on teaching on Monday, August 10.  One is at 2 p.m. and the other is at 4 p.m.   I would love to have you there as several of us chat about the challenges of becoming a better classroom teacher.  If you are interested, grab me after the panel presentations and we can continue the discussion.   ** I have written several times over the years about my basic distrust of student evaluations.   Based on the ones that I have seen, here are some of my issues: (1) � Students are not encouraged to spend enough serious time considering the questions and their responses.   Some students clearly give an appropriate amount of thought and make helpful observations.   Many students appear to dash off their opinions as if they were late fo...

Now and then, I come across some thoughts on teaching that I think are worth sharing.   That happened yesterday here at the Robins School of Business.   My email to our faculty and staff is below.   No matter what the individual jobs are here at Richmond, we are all in the education business.  This place exists, at least in large part, to maximize the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of our students.   Passing information like this along to others can help keep teaching (and the thinking about teaching) alive as an important part of our culture.   You can do the same thing in your building.   Whenever you learn something about teaching that you feel might also help others who face similar challenges, then pass it along.   Don't be timid.   Don't be shy.    ** Email Note: A friend of mine here at the University of Richmond passed along the following URL of a recent NPR discussion with Ken Bain. ...

If you have read this blog for long, you must know that I put considerable stress on communicating with my students, often by email. I believe open and honest communication is a key for all successful relationships. These communications give you a chance to guide your students toward the outcomes that you want. They allow you to motivate the students, to keep pushing them forward (�I know this seems hard but you are smart enough to do these problems with a bit of work�). They provide a chance for positive feedback � �the class was especially good today� is never a bad acknowledgement � one that students often never hear. They enable you to correct actions that you don�t like (�not very many of you had worked problem 5 for today; I�ll expect a better effort at the next class�). Communications help the teacher to prepare the students for upcoming material � �we are really going to stress the computation of interest expense at our next class so make absolutely sure you�ve studied pages 45...