At this time of the semester, I am grading Participation Assessments. I do this twice each semester, asking the students to evaluate their own participation in the course as compared to a rubric. Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery...

“If you never change your mind, why have one?” – Edward de Bono We are, as teachers, in the business of changing minds. Despite this, we are often reluctant to change our own. Over the years, I’ve adopted a number of policies, many of them...

Flickr CC photo my Michael Maclean I avoided grading all morning. I cleaned out my in-box (down to 76 messages!), worked on a project that’s not due for weeks. All because I wrote a really bad essay question, and the results were terrible. The...

In every issue of FACCTS (the publication of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges), there has been a column by David Megill, my former colleague at MiraCosta and a wonderful advocate for faculty rights and independence, one of the...

At a professional development meeting last year, I found myself objecting to the word “training” to describe what the Program for Online Teaching offers to our instructors. Image from SkycaptainTwo at Flickr I was recently made aware that we may need...