What makes a great teacher? Analyzing more than twenty years of data, Teach for America has found that great teachers had trained in their subject areas rather than in education, and had high "life satisfaction." They also demonstrated five tendencies: they

"constantly reevaluate what they are doing... they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."

This last trait is measured by the Grit Scale, which has been shown to predict good outcomes in both teachers and West Point cadets. (Do you have grit?) [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea on Jan 31, 2010 - 133 comments

"I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly." Physics professor Eric Mazur explains the development and use of the "ConcepTest". [more inside]
posted by inkyroom on Nov 20, 2009 - 17 comments

What can video games teach us about learning and literacy? A lot, says James Paul Gee whose recent book approaches the question armed with three different discourses (situated cognition, new literacy studies, and connectionism). [mi]
posted by panoptican on Nov 25, 2005 - 23 comments

Easy grades, light reading loads, and above all a professor you can enjoy. Today’s university culture is one of all entertainment all the time.. an essay by Mark Edmunson based on his new book Why Read? about the the "crisis in the humanities", called the most provocative look since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
posted by stbalbach on Oct 1, 2004 - 54 comments

Teaching physics with superheroes...
...and comics in general. Comics are used to teach math, in "The Mathematical Cartoons of Larry Gonick". While this flash animation addresses the physics of everyday life. Interesting ways to present basic and sometimes not so basic [~400k jpg] topics in science.
posted by talos on Nov 8, 2002 - 8 comments

Teach dance in prison! "The Federal Bureau of Prisons...intends to issue solicitation RFQ 50507-012-2 for the provision to provide Dance Instructor Services with a variety of beginning and advanced dance classes to the inmate population."
posted by kirkaracha on Apr 25, 2002 - 10 comments

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation The best illustration ever of why friends don't let friends use Powerpoint. Some blame a decline in oratory and rhetoric on the television. I blame the temptation to lean on decorative visual crutches.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen on Dec 7, 2001 - 25 comments