Although most faculty use many high tech innovations in the classroom, let’s not forget the necessity for some of the basic accoutrements. After a couple of years of hearing frequent requests for some basic office supplies and also recognizing that there were times I wished I had some sticky notes or whiteboard markers in a classroom, I purchased a nice clean, new toolbox at a local Costco and then filled it with the following:

1. Post-it(r) notes - Nice for notes or for quick activities that required a sticky note.

2. Dry-erase markers - Even though these should be provided in the classrooms, they often are not or the ones provided are as dry as a bone.

3. Scotch tape - I can’t list the different uses you or the students might have for tape.

4. Masking tape - Could be for a classroom use or could tape in the hem of a pair of pants. Believe me. I know.

5. Stapler (and extra staples) – Not sure I need to explain why you might need a stapler. I’m sure you know. however here is what I would emphasize. Have a toolkit stapler that is separate from your office one. That is true for all of the items in the kit. You want to have your office set and leave the toolkit set in the toolkit.

6. Hole punch - This was important because many of my student assignments needed to be put into notebooks prior to turning them in. Students definitely appreciated the fact that I had a decent 3-hole punch that they could use.

7. Paper clips - Although I am not a big fan of paper clips, you might as well have some in there.

8. Pencils & pens - Just like elementary teachers keep extra writing implements available, we might as well, too. And sometimes it’s YOU who needs the pen or pencil, not just the students.

9. Scissors - You might as well have a pair handy.

10. Highlighters - I think it’s worth having these and marking them with a label with your name. You really are intending for these only to be used in the class and not carried off, so label your highlighters (and most everything else).

11. Chalk (yes, indeedy) – Plenty of classrooms still have chalkboards.

12. Extension cord - Pretty amazing how few plugs are in some classrooms; take a cord (and remember to take it with you when you leave!)

13. Door stop (I bought these in large packets at a local Home Depot) – I had to buy them in bulk because I often left them behind. I figured if I taught at the University long enough, I’d end up outfitting every classroom with a doorstop. I wasn’t there quite long enough for that…but I did my part.

I took the same toolkit to class regardless of whether I was teaching an undergraduate methods course, a graduate level seminar, or a class for professors. I never knew for sure which items I would need and I did not have to pack and repack my toolkit; it was always ready to grab and go.

This was a good investment on my part and saved me a great deal of time and frustration over the years.

One of my “colleagues” got very angry with me one day (we taught courses that tended to share the same students). He said,

“Students don’t put out much effort in my class to get their assignments done because they say they have so much work to do for your class. You convince them that what you’re teaching is the most important!”

He continued to bluster for awhile longer (this wasn’t the first time he blustered at me).

It was a fascinating exchange (I did get to make a few comments). But I have never forgotten that experience because I have always believed that what I taught was the most important. Here are some questions that immediately come to mind that I think we all need to consider regarding our own teaching:

• Didn’t he believe that what he taught was most important, too?
• Why would you teach if you didn’t think that what you taught was important?
• Why would you go to school long enough (and become poor enough in the process) to get a doctorate if you didn’t think that your discipline was important?

I did convince my students (not all, but most) to put forth extraordinary efforts. Even today, I see students who still tell me that they use ideas that they learned in my classes. Just this last weekend when I was at Costco, one of my former students was there and told me this – and she was one of my students nearly 20 years ago.

Here are ten tips for you to implement so you, too, can elicit extraordinary efforts from your students:

1. Make your assignments relevant. Explain and reinforce your sense of the assignments’ relevance. so that students know you have been thoughtful about what you are asking them to do.

2. Explain clearly what you want students to do. Don’t assume they understand or can “figure it out.” Help them understand.

3. Provide rubrics, when appropriate. If you aren’t familiar with rubrics, check online and with your college’s teaching & learning center.

4. Demonstrate that you care about the content you are teaching. Do this through your engagement, involvement, and commitment to what you do. Students sense whether you care of not – and it is more than just your words.

5. Put forth extraordinary effort yourself. Every day. Whether you are in class or not.

6. Have students from previous semesters provide written comments for incoming students. You can even have one semester’s students write letters, which are sealed, for the next semester’s students about how to succeed in your class.

7. Provide timely feedback to students. Regardless of whether they are turning in weekly assignments or large projects, get them graded and returned to students quickly.

8. Bring enthusiasm to the classroom about what you teach. Communicate passionately about why you ask students to work as hard as you do.

9. Recognize that sometimes, you were wrong about what you had laid out in the syllabus. This can easily happen the first time you teach a course. It takes you longer to teach something than you had thought or you realize that the timeline expectations you had were overambitious. Acknowledge it and adjust for students. Better to recognize it yourself than have students begging or grousing around.

10. Ask students for exemplars to use in future courses. Many students work well from models and just knowing what is possible is encouraging and challenging for many students.

Students actually want to do well. Ignite that desire in them and elicit excellence and extraordinary effort. It makes being a professor incredibly rewarding.

Over the years, I got smarter about keeping up with my students and their assignments. Once I figured out that numbers were easier – and faster – for recording grades and returning student work, I refined my system. Here are ten tips to help you if you are ready to do the same.

1. Assign your students numbers on the first day of class. If you have 30 students, students will have numbers of 1 – 30. If you have 78 students, they will have numbers assigned to them from 1 – 78.

2. Require that students put their numbers on each piece of work that they turn in. You expect them to include their name (and you hope that they do), but primarily, you are asking that they include their course number.

3. At the end of class, have your helper – and I hope you have one (or hire one) put the papers that were submitted in numerical order. This takes only a few moments and saves so much time later.

4. Input your grades easily when you use numbers. Everything is in order and you just put students grades into your gradebook (or more likely your computer).

5. Put the papers to return into 1-31 files. Because they are all in order, you just drop them into the slots (or better yet, have your assistant drop them into the corresponding slot.

6. Have students retrieve their work from the 1-31 files vs. you handing the papers back. This was one of the best things about having numbers is the ease with which I could allow students to retrieve their own papers. Students know that before class starts, during a break, or right after class, they just come up, look in their numbered slot, and grab whatever papers are in there to be returned.

7. If anyone is absent, you put today’s handouts into the slot so it’s there the next time. This way, you are worrying bringing something back week to week (hoping to remember it and hoping to know where it is to remember to give it to the student. If it’s in the slot, then you can stop worrying about it.

8. You can take attendance by seeing whose stuff is still in their slots. Usually, I don’t announce that at the beginning of class, but rather make it clear to students that they are ONLY to be in their own slot, not anyone else’s for privacy reasons. The reality is that in addition to that reason, I can see whose materials are still in the slot and take roll quickly after class. It’s not the only way I take attendance but sometimes it works great.

9. You can call out numbers to mix up who is responding. Having students have numbers to use for activities like this is easy to use.

10. You can group people by number when you’re doing small group in-class interaction. This is just another way of not necessarily grouping people who are sitting near each other. You don’t have to take the time to count off because you have pre-counted them off (not a great phrase but you know what I mean!)

Try assigning numbers if you have a class of 90 or fewer. Buying the 1-31 expandable file folders and renumbering a second or a third one (up to 93) works fine. Beyond that, you will probably want a different system.

1. Sanctioned - Say to yourself, this is my sanctioned writing time. It’s very honoring.

2. Protected - Say to someone in your family, “This is my protected writing time. Let’s work around that.”

3. Scheduled - Say to a person who asks for time when you are scheduled to be writing, “This is my scheduled writing time, but what about _____ as an alternative?”

4. Sacrosanct - This just sounds like a good word for a writer to say about his/her writing time, doesn’t it?

5. Strategic - Use this word to describe your writing time to someone who thinks strategically and needs to understand that writers are also planful and deliberate, not just playing.

6. Required - If you are a writer (and I assume you are because you’re reading this), you are required to write or you aren’t a writer any more.

7. Non-negotiable - There are people who consider their Saturday afternoon nap time non-negotiable so I think you can describe your writing time as non-negotiable. If it is, that is…

8. Dedicated - You may need to say this one to yourself.

9. No-Matter-What - You might use this one out of desperation when you are up against a deadline. Saying it out of desperation is not very powerful, but if it works, then use it. If, however, you have used some of the ones earlier on the list, you are less likely to get into a desperate mode.

10. Unless there’s blood or bone in evidence, not to be disturbed… Generally, this is one that needs to be used by mothers, graduate advisors, and the like. It’s when the “children,” (be they actual children or adults who act like children) can’t seem to make any decisions when the “parent” is not there to referee. Use this if you need to.

If you need to practice, then please do. Imagine the scenario where you have 10 – noon on Thursday as your protected writing time. When someone asks if you can meet then, you say, “I can’t meet then because that is my required writing time. How about meeting at noon or anytime later that afternoon?”

Note: When I was sharing this list with people in one of my writing groups, one person said that the word she uses to talk about her dedicated writing time is, “MINE!” I like it!

Q.What “end of the day/debriefing” strategies do you recommend?  As a follow-up to that question, what do you recommend doing when you are finished teaching a class (a single-day lesson)?  I mean end of class techniques to bring closure to the class for you and organization/preparedness for the next class meeting.  For example, someone told me one such strategy they heard about was to attach a huge post-it note to the outside of your lecture notes for that day at the end of the class meeting and spend some time writing what worked and what didn’t work so that the next time you revisited that material, you would have that extra insight.  Any others? (they can be methods to improve the class for next time you teach it, to keep thoughts/to dos organized for things you need to do before the class meets again, things that one should always do at the end of class so that they are ready for the next class, etc.)

Meggin’s Answer:   Here are a few I like:

1. Hand out notecards (3×5) and ask them to write

• An answer to a “BIG” question you ask – something that really asks them to pull together many things from the day’s class.
  
• A question that they hope gets answered in the next class.
  
• What puzzled them the most during the day’s class (or the preparatory reading, or whatever you’d want to ask about).
  
• Or something else along this line.  So, you can use the “Card” strategy a few times during the semester just varying what prompt you give them.
  

2. One of my SUPER favorites that I usually use about the 3^rd week of class:  Start, Stop, Continue.  I give them a page with those 3 words on it and as them to write something (or more than one thing) that they would like me (or the class) to Start doing, something they would like me (or the class) to Stop doing/happening, whatever, and something that they would like us to Continue doing.  Their answers are fascinating on many levels.

3. 3 by 3 (another one I really like – and I usually us this a few weeks into the class.  Sheet of paper with 3 by 3 printed at the top in large font.  I ask them to write 3 aspects of the class that they think are going well and 3 that they think could be improved.  I tell them I want 3 and 3 not 5 and 1 or 2 and 4 or any other combo.  3 and 3.  It’s very helpful and also tends to be quite affirming.

4. 3, 2, 1 – You can mix this up many different ways but here’s an example:

Ask students to write 3 concepts that they learned in today’s class, 2 reasons why today’s content will be useful in the future, and 1 question that they have related to the content.  That’s just a sample.  I’ve mixed it up many ways.

Student evaluations are a part of every faculty member’s life. Some consider them to be a positive part of the academic life and others dismiss them as a meaningless exercise (or even worse, as a detriment to good teaching).

You might as well know that I come down on the side of student evaluations being a necessary and worthwhile component of teaching at the college and university level. I also received – and I believe, earned – great student evaluations over the 19 years that I taught undergraduate and graduate students. This wasn’t a fluke.

Here are six suggestions for ensuring that you earn and receive high evaluations from students:

1. Teach well. This may sound like I’m making a flip comment, but it is not intended to be so. First and foremost, if you want to earn great student evaluations, you need to be a great teacher. Some people teach well almost naturally, it seems. Others have to work VERY hard at becoming great teachers. No matter how good you already are, work to be even better. That’s your first tip – and not one to ignore.

2. Determine what you want students to write on your evaluations. For example, I wanted to students to write “I’ve never worked so hard in a class and I’ve never learned so much.” You may have a very clear sense of what you want students to write or you may need to do some extra thinking about this.

3. Tell students on the first day of class, “Here is what I am expecting to have you write on my evaluations at the end of the semester.” Then tell them. You have the phrasing for this after you complete tip #5. You are letting them know what you want and are beginning to install that kind of thinking for them. This also helps them know what your expectations are – and I always assure the students how I will be working so that I earn whatever the positive comments are that they will be making.

4. Teach your classes with whatever it is that you want students to write in mind. This includes your preparation, your demeanor in the classroom, your interactions with students, the grading of their assignments, etc. You are making sure that you earn and deserve the good evaluations that you are going to receive. The idea is that you are delivering on the “goods.”

5. Begin doing course evaluations no later than the end of the third week of class. This may sound crazy and even a little scary, but…you want to begin asking early and often (within reason, of course) how the class is going for the students. You can ask them to do informal evaluations or you can do more formal evaluations. I prefer short, frequent check-ins with students to see if there are areas where I am not doing well and that I am willing to address (e.g., if they think my expectations are too high, I am not likely to change that, but if they say I spend too long explaining something that had already been explained in the syllabus and they would rather I told people to go back and reread the syllabus, well…that’s good feedback for me).

No matter how magnificent you are as a teacher, you will always have a few students who don’t give you a “high” ranking. But if you use the ideas that are in this article, you will have the majority of students providing a fair, respectful, and good evaluation of your teaching. I know from experience and from helping lots of others with this.

When I teach, I often want to use supplemental material (or even need to because the text I use doesn’t cover something). What guidelines must I follow to ensure I’m not violating copyright? If it’s just a section of a text, can I copy it and hand it out? If it’s an article from the library can I copy it and hand it out? Must I get written permission from the publisher or is there ever an “intellectual merit – sharing knowledge for the greater good” domain? I feel like I teach my students not to plagiarize, but am afraid I am probably guilty of doing it myself . . .

Here’s my response:

Oh, my goodness. This is a VERY good question and smart to ask.

I noodled around on the internet looking for some good answers and this site seems to spell it out well:

http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml

For example:

When is Permission Required?

• When you intend to use the materials for commercial purposes.

• When you want to use the materials repeatedly.

• When you want to use a work in its entirety and it is longer than 2,500 words.

I know when I was a faculty member, I could put something in the library on reserve for students to read but only for one semester. And if it was in a course packet (like a whole article that was included), I needed to get permission. There is a copyright clearinghouse that most journals have gone to so it’s easy and usually I never had to pay anything. The only time I had to pay was if I was copying a chapter from a book and then that was about $50 – I think I had to do that once. I think this is the service (I remember it was CCC: http://www.copyright.com/)

Fair use is a big term in copyright law. And teachers, in particular, have assumed that fair use meant they could do anything almost…and that got some people into trouble.

When you find a good article in the newspaper and copy it because it’s current and you bring that in, you’re fine (citing the source, etc.). If it’s a segment from someone else’s book, you may need to look into it further.

We all need to be smart about this, especially when we are teaching and trying to model it for our students!!

• Persistence

Persistence

A defining aspect of a toxic academic work environment is whether or not the behavior persists. Are you experiencing a situation that even after talking with someone about particular behaviors, attitudes, or something else, the person persists – or it even becomes worse? Not a good sign.  If you have done everything you know how to do, i.e., used all the professional and personal skills you have and it’s not making any difference, you can imagine that things are likely to get worse.  Check the persistence of ‘misbehavior’ that is upsetting to you and to others.  The longer it continues unchecked, the worse it will get.  Toxic behavior in the academic work environment does NOT go away by itself. 

Please consider what is happening in your department, lab, unit, or college. Check the length of time, persistence, severity, effect on others, and the loss of good people. It’s better to take care of potential problems EARLY. Once a bullying culture has been established, it is VERY difficult to change – and VERY expensive. You can’t afford that and neither can the country.

Sadly, toxicity exists in the academic work environment. If you would like to access a free teleseminar (*Antioxidants for a Toxic Academic Work Environment*) that was hosted by Gina Hiatt of The Academic Ladder (http://www.AcademicLadder.com), feel free to go to http://meggin.com/academicladder.php.

(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm). Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do. Sound interesting? It is!

• Severity

Severity

The severity is a key issue to take a look at. When someone murmurs “Oh gosh, I can’t believe we’ve got this meeting again” or, “Who made her queen?” or similar statements that sometimes people make, that’s not that the end of the world. It’s neither helpful nor necessary, but it’s really not toxic.

But once it becomes severe and the statements are more personal and more intentionally hurtful, that is when people start to feel fearful. They’re afraid for their jobs. They’re afraid for their tenure. They’re afraid for access to people, access to materials or space. When fear and anger are starting to permeate the environment and really become part of the ‘accepted’ culture, that’s when warning signs should be going off – to everyone (including the department chair, dean, etc.) Of course, sometimes they are the ones who are causing the toxicity, right? But that’s a different article.

Please consider what is happening in your department, lab, unit, or college. Check the length of time, persistence, severity, effect on others, and the loss of good people. It’s better to take care of potential problems EARLY. Once a bullying culture has been established, it is VERY difficult to change – and VERY expensive. You can’t afford that and neither can the country.

Sadly, toxicity exists in the academic work environment. If you would like to access a free teleseminar (*Antioxidants for a Toxic Academic Work Environment*) that was hosted by Gina Hiatt of The Academic Ladder (http://www.AcademicLadder.com), feel free to go to http://meggin.com/academicladder.php.

(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm). Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do. Sound interesting? It is!

• Loss of good people

Loss of good people

In a toxic environment, you also start to notice that you’re losing good people. Either you lose them altogether or you keep them physically but you lose them mentally and emotionally. Administrators must pay attention to this. If there’s some sort of unusual turnover in a department or in any other unit, then the administrator ought to be taking a look and wonder (and find out), ‘What is going on and why?”

Please consider what is happening in your department, lab, unit, or college. Check the length of time, persistence, severity, effect on others, and the loss of good people. It’s better to take care of potential problems EARLY. Once a bullying culture has been established, it is VERY difficult to change – and VERY expensive. You can’t afford that and neither can the country.

Sadly, toxicity exists in the academic work environment. If you would like to access a free teleseminar (*Antioxidants for a Toxic Academic Work Environment*) that was hosted by Gina Hiatt of The Academic Ladder (http://www.AcademicLadder.com), feel free to go to http://meggin.com/academicladder.php.

(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm). Through her company, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., Meggin McIntosh changes what people know, feel, dream, and do. Sound interesting? It is!