Student ratings are not leaving today or anytime soon. However, as the title of this article indicates, student ratings are not the only option to provide evidence in the evaluation of teaching. There is a broad range of alternatives to consider beyond student ratings in the delicate decision-making processes to improve teaching and determine the…

This article is the second in a series of three articles about microaggressions. All of the articles are tailored specifically to help enable faculty developers, provosts and directors of diversity and training, faculty, and administrators to address the most critical issues related to this topic in higher education. Specific responses to and…

A Complete Your Manuscript Workshop has been provided to tenure track faculty members in the college over the past two and one-half years. The workshop is a low-cost/high payoff opportunity for the college and participating faculty members, as the workshop requires few resources and the time commitment for participants is easily managed.…

This article is the final installment in a series of three articles about microaggressions. All of the articles are tailored specifically to help enable faculty developers, provosts and directors of diversity and training, faculty, and administrators to address the most critical issues related to this topic in higher education. Specific responses…

A core question for educators at any stage of their career is often, "How do I improve my own teaching style, and how can I be the educator of the caliber I aspire to be?" In this series of reflective essays, the authors will offer strategies for developing an innovative and individual style that embraces core educational values.…

The effects of focusing on learning objectives--not instructional objectives--and of viewing each objective as a unit of instruction can be significant, both for the students and for the instructor.

This article is the first in a series of three articles on microaggressions. All of the articles are tailored specifically for faculty developers, provosts and directors of diversity and training, faculty, and administrators to address the most critical issues on this topic in higher education. This one presents a framework for understanding the…

Assessment is a cyclical process within which educators construct outcomes, implement programs, assess constructs such as learning, evaluate results, and utilize results to craft stronger programs and services. Within educational and faculty development, assessment measures program impact on faculty, students, and/or institutional culture.…

In this essay, social media are presented as complex tools that require student involvement from potential classroom implementation to the post-mortem. The "choose, explore, analyze" approach narrows social media options for the classroom based on student feedback and allows students and teachers to work together to understand why and…

A common decision of journal editors when faced with promising papers is that the author revise-and-resubmit. Responding thoughtfully and strategically to this invitation improves the probability of eventual acceptance dramatically. However, in the rush-to-publish, early-career educational researchers may lack awareness and skill in managing the…

Scholarly teaching, the act of systematically examining the links between one's teaching and student learning, remains a challenging idea for many faculty members. We argue that two threshold concepts--teaching as an inquiry-based process and teaching as a public act--serve as powerful hurdles to the more wide spread adoption of scholarly teaching…

Even though many curricula are built on a foundational assumption that students will transfer knowledge from one course to the next, faculty often struggle with teaching for transfer. This article introduces the design of courses for transfer as a threshold concept that is conceptually difficult and cognitively troublesome, yet potentially…

Requiring and fostering shifts in perspective, practice, and identity, the counter-normative pedagogy of service-learning can be challenging for faculty to learn. Meyer and Land's (2003, 2005) work on threshold concepts may enhance understanding of the troublesome yet transformative nature of learning to collaborate reciprocally with students and…

Developing a course with a service-learning component includes several factors. One common mistake among faculty members involves the practice of sending students into the community without a plan for connecting the experience with the learning objectives of the course. Invariably, the service component is where the experience ends for the…

Meetings have a bad reputation with faculty. Rarely does one hear a positive word uttered about an upcoming or past meeting. That reputation has metastasized throughout higher education. The primary reason is because meetings can be major time wasters, accomplishing very little, often deteriorating into just another social event, or they may be…