Students in colleges and universities need to be able to learn how to communicate effectively both within the specialized arenas of their chosen disciplines and, increasingly, with a wide variety of public and professional audiences. One way to accomplish this goal is to integrate the development of effective writing and speaking skills into both…

Faculty engage in "pedagogical solitude," in which they plan, teach, and assess their work alone. To optimize teaching environments and learning outcomes, students can serve as "student pedagogical teams" (SPT) and provide feedback on instructor performance, course structure, and content. Using self-determination theory, this…

The central goals of teaching are to educate students about the course material and stimulate their intellectual development more generally. Yet faculty have few avenues to assess teaching effectiveness on these fronts, and students have few opportunities to reflect upon their own growth as scholars and citizens. This article details an exercise…

A discussion of creativity and curiosity, particularly in the context of college instruction, examines two psychological models of creativity, the cognitive approach of Howard Gardner and one aligned with depth psychology (James Hillman). Commonalities are noted: preference for mess over management and for boundaries transgressed rather than…

The traditional college curriculum is seen as a collection of answers for students who do not yet have the questions; an alternative approach that nurtures students' capacities for inquiry is suggested and outlined. (MSE)

A teaching workshop for faculty from member liberal arts colleges in the Central Pennsylvania Consortium is reported. Presentations of the William Perry scheme of student intellectual and moral development are described. (MLW)

Literature and liberal arts college students' early research experience usually stresses methodology and is carefully structured and supervised. In advanced work, students must begin to develop habits of critical thinking, personal involvement with their material, and development of a metacritical attitude. (MSE)

College teachers must take care not to treat students as a homogeneous, passive mass audience and equate lecturing with classroom control. Rather, they should judge teaching success by what students can do at course's end, reinforce desired intellectual behavior, test in ways that allow students to show abilities, and learn to interpret student…

The purpose of this scholarship of teaching research is to assess the effectiveness of a cross-cultural problem-solving assignment in two senior-level family and consumer sciences courses at the University of Wyoming. We focus on the development of selected cognitive and affective critical-thinking skills in undergraduates and their international…

This article discusses William G. Perry's model of intellectual development, which posits that college students move through four phases of understanding their relationship to knowledge: dualism (knowledge as received truth), multiplicity (knowledge as opinion), relativism (knowledge as relativistic), and commitment in relativism. Specific…

Several college teachers formed a writing circle to talk about their writing, improve writing skills, and develop articles for publication. An unanticipated outcome was improvement of instruction through adoption of new teaching methods, increased empathy with students as writers, and ability to reach students at different stages of intellectual…

College faculty are not trained for intensely emotional discussion of non-Eurocentric topics that may arise in a diversified curriculum. They must learn to teach students to separate facts from cultural assumptions; shift perspective and acknowledge the validity of other viewpoints; and differentiate between personal discomfort and intellectual…