Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Welcome to Seminarium

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Well-known-as-excellent Instructor 1: “Some of us were talking at lunch about how our efforts in course design, treatment and in the scholarship of teaching & learning, buy fit in as part of our professional development here at Local Seminary.”

Well-known-as-excellent Instructor 2: “I really want to hear more as you work that out, sale because–in all sincerity–it would never have occurred to me in a hundred years that someone would ‘design’ a course.”

It’s in the spirit of this exchange that we welcome you to Seminarium: The Elements of Great Teaching, a group blog and resource site dedicated to pedagogy for religious studies in higher education.We invite you to join with us here as we “bootstrap each other up” on our understandings and practices in the craft of education.

What do we here at Seminarium hope to bring? And what do we hope for you to bring?

  1. We hope to bring two things: an ever-growing body of resources, and toward that end, an ongoing, collaborative discussion on pedagogy that is grounded in theory and practice.
  2. We hope that you will bring your lively and thoughtful participation. Please participate freely in the Comments sections. Link profligately to your own relevant material on the Web. Ask follow-up questions, share your own perspectives and experiences, offer your constructive criticisms. Notice our licensing: Seminarium content is offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: you may (and should!) link to our content, share it with others, even “mix” it; but, DO include attribution, DO refrain from commercial use, and DO offer any derivative works under the SAME license (CC BY-NC-SA).

As a topic, “Pedagogy” here should be broadly conceived: when our pool of bloggers brainstormed about what we would find useful in a pedagogy blog, these are some of the topics that came up. As far as I can see, all of them are relevant to both online and to face-to-face learning:

  • The instructor’s role: When should the teacher be center stage, and when should she be de-centered (the old, “sage on the stage” vs. “guide on the side”)? How do I weigh the task of knowledge-dissemination alongside that of facilitating meaning-making student activity? How much control should I try to exert over our students’ learning? Can a teacher be both a co-learner and an authoritative expert?
  • Trends, trends, trends: MOOCs! Adjunctification! MOOCs! Financial crisis! Mobile learning! And, MOOCs!
  • The “new transparency”: digital learning and teaching (and the accompanying public scrutiny) seem to force us all to talk with one another about our classroom methods and habits. Is it safe? Should it be?
  • Selecting among web resources: There are a lot of suggestions out there for resources and activities. What guiding principles about how learning happens can help me separate the wheat from the chaff?
  • The place of teaching in professional development: How do we balance our teaching with scholarship in our fields of study and with institutional service? Is there a correct “special blend,” and how can we know what it is? How can we teach AND thrive?
  • Academic study and faith formation: How should a learner relate her own religious commitments—whatever they are!—to their subject matter’s materials and methods, whether in biblical studies, or church history, or ancient Near Eastern history and literature, or theology, or liturgy, or pastoral care, or…?
  • Time management: What are some of the habits of excellent teachers who also have a life? Can I design a great course that it takes up less of my time? For example, what is a good “contact policy” in this age of constant contact?
  • Assessment and outcomes: Does good grading have to take forever? Do grading rubrics help to clarify expectations, or do they discourage student creativity? Is there such a thing as too much detail in a grading rubric? Is a “contract” a good thing or a bad thing, and why?
  • Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas: What’s good about a “learning management system”? Do they free learning by taking the resources and activities beyond the classroom, or is an LMS just another box? Can–and should–they have doors and windows to the World Wide Web?

While you’re here, look around: Seminarium blogs include Categories and Tags. Categories are few and fairly stable, whereas Tags are numerous and grow unpredictably. The current Categories are SemClass (relating to the classroom); SemTech (relating to educational technologies); SemLoci (relating to a blogger’s academic field of study); and SemTrends (relating to trends in higher education). Try them now if you like: float your cursor over one of these categories above.

Please have fun, and please speak up.

Seminarium is a brainchild of Fortress Education.

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Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.