Editor`s Note

I vividly remember a day in graduate school when I was a TA and had just finished teaching one of the most successful classes I can remember teaching. I’d acted tough and demanded seriousness in a way I hadn’t before. We were doing Emily Dickinson and I made them look up the words and read the definitions as we explicated the poems. They were surprised at my demeanor, but buckled down and did the work. I was exhilarated when class ended and bubbled over telling fellow TAs about it in our office. When I’d finished, a colleague whom I liked and admired just said in a patronizing way, “So you put on a good show.” I’ve nursed the pain of that for 30 years; so you can imagine how good I felt when I read Marilla Svinicki’s AD REM . . . . Marilla shows how performing may be one of the best ways to teach.

The AD REM . . . isn’t the only piece in this issue I have strong feelings about. In the last 20 years I’ve had the chance to meet and interview a great many passionately committed, inventive teachers: It’s one of the prime pleasures of producing the Forum. When I bumped into Laura Gibbs in an internet search, I knew right away that I’d met another such teacher. I don’t see where Laura finds time to maintain all the blogs, write all the books, and keep up with all the new software, but the world of the Classics never looked so vital and intriguing as it does when viewed through her eyes. Her example displays so well the fact that good teachers will find a way to be good teachers whatever modality they reach their students through. She teaches online, but even absent face-to-face contact, she manages to give her students more individual (and hence tailored) attention than most faculty do seeing their students in classes meeting three times a week. Since we know that tutoring offers perhaps the best instructional model for effective teaching, Laura seems to have found a way to combine the most ancient truths about teaching with the most modern means of connecting.

Speaking of tutoring, isn’t that really another word for coaching? An article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker provoked a lot of excitement in me and a lot of thought about the ways coaching (which I’d never understood before or had a very positive feeling about) may represent one of the highest forms of teaching (ESSAY, p. 8). Reflecting on the bond between the most effective coaches and their charges offers important food for thought about the bond we want to form between students and teachers more generally.

It’s often said that in the end students must take responsibility for their own learning and that a teacher’s final job lies in helping students connect the dots in what they know and between what they know and what they can then do. Laure Paquette of Lakehead University in Canada has come up with a simple way to use a grid to help them do just that. She, too, is another of those passionate teachers interested in the whole student.

Mike Rodgers’s TECHPED pursues a train of thought with a similar direction. What if courses, both online and face-to-face were designed with the same persuasive elegance Steve Jobs brought to the design of the iPhone, iPad, and other computer innovations? What if their design focused more on the student and empowering the student?

The warmest of happy holiday wishes to all the Forum’s readers.

- James Rhem