Many of the "special features" being added to the Web site end up in a section I'm calling the Library. You'll find the UMI abstracts of all the dissertations on teaching and learning for the last six years there, for example. And with this issue, I'm opening a section called "Curiosities" there. Go and have a look at an educational artifact I collected last summer. I've been mulling over its meaning ever since. (Mysterious, huh?)

Other supplementary materials accompanying this issue include an introduction to and downloadable questionnaires and rating scales for the SGID or Small Group Instructional Diagnostic (see the video review on pages 9-10). It's a method for getting solid, usable information about your teaching effectiveness. Also, to flesh out this issue, Madeleine Picciotto has allowed me to post two of the scenarios she uses in her writing course at Spelman College (see page 8).

Webs have always connected us; the Internet is but the newest. Tom Creed suggests it offers the best use of computer technology for teaching. The colorful ease of presentation software, he warns, can tempt faculty back into older, less effective forms of teaching, now gussied up in new dress.

That temptation, that lure to return to the good old days when teachers taught and students learned and that was that, reminds us that the teaching life was never so simple. In the old days, we failed to reach many students because we didn't know how. Some of them—probably many of them—could have succeeded if we had known, but we didn't. Part of what we didn't know has to do with how humans learn, and a lot of that is now becoming more and more a part of how we teach (as Peter Summers' PRAXIS piece demonstrates). But another part may have had to do with that inner web, that mass of inner connections, assumptions and habits that dictate how we act out our roles as teachers. Robert Boice brought the perspective of an ethologist to his many years of working with faculty. Applying the same sort of perspective as Tom Peters took in In Search of Excellence, Boice studied what made some faculty effective teachers and productive scholars. What made them tick? How did they approach their work? After years of research, he saw a broad pattern of elements which he calls "first-order principles" for college teaching. To me, they describe an almost spiritual path, a path of self-awareness and gentle self-control, of persistent action spurred not by rampant ambition or over-weaning pride, but by strong, modest faith in the worth of teaching. It's the kind of outlook I've always wanted, but seldom have been able to hold for very long. Perhaps that's why I'm drawn to Boice's work. It's certainly not because the path seems quick or easy. It doesn't. It seems hard. But the data—and the teachings of most of the wisdom traditions—support it. Maybe it's time we listened and began to really succeed in what we're doing.