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People learn in such different ways. I envy folks who can simply read a book about something and understand it and be able to go out and do it. I learn best when I’m show, so I like examples. The many “quick hits” in the little book from Indiana’s FACET group offer the kind of practical examples that both encourage and motivate me. I hope it’s the same for you. For example (speaking of examples), I never would have thought of using “clickers” in humanities courses, but I began to see how it might be done and done well in one of these “quick hits.”

By now most faculty have heard of “clickers.” In this issue David S. Goldstein, University of Washington Bothell, explores how using these devices can help faculty find out what students are thinking and engage them more actively in the learning being promoted in the classroom. Wide participation, greater honesty, and less teeth pulling(i.e., quicker response) rank among the biggest pluses in using them.

Encouraging engagement and deepening the learning in a population of students bombarded and distracted by an explosion of media presents a huge challenge for today’s faculty. Monika Raesch, Suffolk University, decided to literally make the medium the message. Instead of lecturing about film and various theories of narrative, she decided to structure her entire course like a movie. She started with a basic idea, a couple of student actors to star in story, and she was off. When she stopped the prepared movie stub and the lights came up, the class understood they’d be taking it from there, applying the theories they were studying to where their narrative should go next. And the movie grew and changed through the semester as their learning evolved. Raesch surely put a lot of work into this course, but will the students ever forget what they learned or the example of such a committed teacher?

The authors of the FORUM’s new CREATIVITY CAFÉ column would surely applaud the creativity of Raesch’s teaching and, I suspect, see how it also taught creativity without that being her overt intention. Their column in this issue points out that that same media sea current students emerge from has them searching for familiar waters rich in creative possibility. Faculty’s challenge lies in encouraging their creativity while showing them the place of critical thinking in the process.

Can teaching be fun? Can it ever be funny? Most faculty bridle at pressure to add humor to their teaching, but most also think they have good senses of humor. Jack Lachman, Brooklyn College, reminds readers that research shows students feel more at ease and learn more in classes where humor figures are part of the instruction. Lachman teaching accounting, an area not known for humor, but it can be found, he says, and applied to good effect. But more than the lubrication humor offers to learning accounting principles, Lachman points out that in incorporating humor into the teaching of professional subjects like accounting, faculty present good professional role models. In the real world, students will find that getting along with others, being able to make (and take) a joke is important to their success.

Finally, Marilla Svinicki’s AD REM . . . looks at the shifting mix of goals faculty carry into the classroom. It’s a mix not unlike the one churning their students—mastery, performance, failure avoidance. There’s a place for each of these, she suggests. The challenge lies in getting the mix right and not being dominated by one.

—James Rhem

It may turn out that only a small audience of specialists in education read Alan Schoenfeld’s How We Think: A Theory of Goal-Oriented Decision Making and its Educational Applications, but if so, I think that will be a pity. It’s a different sort of book in many ways, a book very rich in data and analysis, but the number of exclamation marks and personal examples evince a passionate humanistic energy in this very scientific approach to the investigation of teaching. Schoenfeld’s work immediately engages the interest of anyone who sees the value of models and careful observation (and anyone who’s lived very long know how much we miss by not looking carefully enough). It’s easy to agree that “resources, goals, and orientations” form the tripod of teaching. It’s easy to see how they intertwine complexly at every turn. In sorting them out Schoenfeld doesn’t make all this less of a mystery so much as he deepens our appreciation of it and offers the prospect of enjoying it more fully as we improve our practice through a deeper understanding of what we’re doing.

As teachers, we like to think we always know what we are doing, but sometimes we don’t. In their latest CREATIVITY CAFÉ, our team of authors examine the difference between teaching creatively (something most of us want to do) and teaching creativity (something we are only now beginning to believe possible). In academe we’ve long championed the “blue pencil” aimed at editing, correcting, and thinking straight. But what of the other pencils and paint brushes, the springs and tools of those who don’t think straight, but whose thinking expresses and extends human vitality? Putting on a show may amuse, but does it free students to grab and use knowledge in new ways?

Teaching has long been a balancing act. How much technology enhances teaching and how much is just faddish and distracting? In this issue’s TECHPED, Mike Rogers takes up José Antonio Bowen’s book, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, and its exploration of these questions. Bowen first voiced the ideas in his book in an article in the FORUM some years ago (V16[1]). We welcome a discussion of them again in these pages.

Ed Nuhfer’s DEVELOPER’S DIARY this time pushes further the inquiry into the differences between the frames of thinking in technology and science. Lots of things contribute to our being confused about the differences. We have that pesky STEM acronym that squeezes technology and engineering between science on the one end and math (that essential and baffling line of inquiry sometimes called “the queen of the sciences”) on the other. It’s no wonder we’re confused. Ed has probed deeply into these metadisciplinary questions, interviewing faculty in architecture, engineering, medicine, and computer science to see what faculty think about these questions. Find these interviews as supplemental material posted at www.ntlf.com.

Marilla Sviniki takes up another aspect of the balancing act in this issue’s AD REM … column. For years teachers have known that “performance” motivates some students while “understanding” motivates others. And for years they’ve seen the latter motivation as preferable to the former. Now, however, research has some positive things to say about “performance” motivation suggesting teachers might utilize mixed goals to help both sorts of students learn more in their classes.

I first met Libby Jones when I spoke at Berea College several years ago. During that visit I came across some excellent handouts on listening in Berea’s teaching and learning center that she’d created, and we began to talk about an article on listening for the FORUM. I’d been interested in the subject for a very long time. Years before I’d encountered an ad in LIFE magazine for a course on listening created by Xerox. I still wonder what it had to say. Time passed, and Libby and I lost contact until Parker Palmer’s visit to Berea earlier this year restored our connection when he brought back greetings. Those good handouts were still near the top of my potential article pile, and I asked Libby if she were still interested. She graciously agreed.

I’m especially happy to have this piece in this issue because I think it goes well with the Richard Davidson interview on his book, The Emotional Life Of Your Brain. Davidson’s work gives scientific support for and deeper understanding of aspects of being human that some have understood and explored for centuries in other non-scientific ways. His study of the biological truths of positive emotion, contemplation, meditation on the development of mindfulness and compassion offer persuasive and hopeful insights into our learning capacity as whole beings. We think, but we also feel, and, indeed, it seems we do not think in deeply meaningful ways without feeling. There are implications in his work for teaching and learning, for when we truly teach and truly learn we are calling on the whole being in ourselves and in our students. To do that, however unaccustomed we may be to acknowledging it, we must feel as well as think; we must listen as well as speak. Isn’t it true that when we learn we feel expansion, joy, relief, an enlargement of being that gives us delight and encouragement? And when we have taught, truly taught, do we not feel something similar combined perhaps with the comforting embrace of humility? It’s always been that way for me.

But in speaking of listening, let’s not forget seeing. Seeing, it’s long been said, is believing. And it may be if not “the key” at least “a key” to effectively teaching the basic truths and some of the skills of critical thinking. Young-Kyung Min’s article on teaching critical thinking as part of the writing program at the University of Washington-Bothell certainly opened my eyes. The Visual Thinking Exercise employed seems so commonsensical and effective I don’t know why I never thought of it. Just being able to have students experience the difference between Critical Thinking and Rhetorical Thinking seems a huge advance.

The question lurking behind even the strongest encouragement, the most positive news about teaching and learning remains this: Can we teach everybody? Do the advances (changes?) in technology really allow us to teach more effectively and to teach large numbers of students at once via the Internet. Perhaps they do, but there are critical questions to be asked even as more and more schools rush forward to make their MOOCs. Marilla Svinicki raises a number of the questions we need to think about in her AD REM … column that concludes this issue.

We’ll take up more of these questions about technology in our first issue of the coming year. Until then, happy holidays to all.