Category Archives: Pedagogical Theory

Teaching and Tenure

As the high cost of university education has come under scrutiny in our fragile economic climate, significant attention has been devoted to the value of tenure. In my small corner of academia, the American Bar Association—the accrediting body for law … Continue reading

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Evidence-based Study Skills

How many times have students come to your office and asked your advice about how to study? Perhaps the student was a struggling first year or did poorly on the last test.  What do you tell them? My standard response … Continue reading

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What’s my value as a teacher?

As faculty at an institution of higher education, and private, expensive institution at that, I often discuss the future of education.  In situations that I’m sure many of you have experienced, family and friends often ask me why college is … Continue reading

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Death to the Credit Hour?

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created the credit hour in the early 1900s as part of a pension system for university faculty.  It has evolved into a universal measurement of the credit students receive for the classes … Continue reading

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A Sense of Wonder

Today I’m attending the annual conference of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, and I heard a keynote address by Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State. He gave one of those wildly popular TED … Continue reading

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Multiple-choice exams in a liberal-arts curriculum (Part II)

Notwithstanding the urging of the speaker at the 1984 AALS workshop for new teachers (see Part I below), multiple-choice questions would seem, at first blush, to be inappropriate in courses that emphasize synthesis of highly abstract concepts and application of … Continue reading

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Multiple-choice exams in a liberal-arts curriculum (Part I)

The summer before I started teaching at SMU in 1984, the law school sent me to the workshop for new teachers that is sponsored each year by our professional association, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). During that two-day … Continue reading

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