“Never use a red pen” and other maxims for reflective teaching
✍ Scribed by J. Mark Schuster
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 141 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0276-8739
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Over the past 6 or 7 years a group of staff and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has looked for ways in which the quality of university teaching might be improved. We have developed and implemented, with some success, an unusually diverse set of responses: skills-based seminars; videotaped teaching with feedback; awards for excellent teachers; serious orientations for new faculty and for new teaching assistants; visible attention from the president and the provost; an institutewide forum on university teaching; guest lectures; alternative programs that address different learning styles; a library of materials on university teaching; workshops in the use of computer technology; and the like. Arguably, each of these has made a contribution to the improvement of teaching at MIT, though usually less than we had hoped for.
Increasingly, I have come to the conclusion that the key lies less in developing teaching skills of a particular stripe, or in utilizing new classroom technologies, than it does in helping and encouraging faculty to become what might be called "reflective teachers," 1 teachers who are thoughtful about what is happening in their classrooms, indeed, about what is happening every time they interact with students, teachers who treat their teaching experiences as data about their teaching in much the same way that they treat seriously the data collected in the course of their research. What seems most important is that a reflective teacher cannot help but be a learner, learning both about the art and craft of