Professors, study thine own teaching

After many years, I am convinced that I am a reflective practitioner, and blogging is yet another way in which I can be that kind of an academic. Of course, the seed for such a behavior came a long time ago when I read Donald Schon's book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

It is, therefore, logical that I should value the scholarship of teaching and learning--after all, in a teaching university my primary responsibility is to teach, and reflecting on that is nothing but the idea of scholarship of teaching and learning. I now have one more person to quote on this topic: Derek Bok, who was once the president of Harvard, for quite a few years actually.
In the Chronicle, Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview.
"They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

All right, Dr. Bok, please spread this word :-) And he doesn't stop there ....

Mr. Bok blamed much of the failure of faculty members to teach effectively on their graduate-school education.
Graduate education, he said, focuses almost entirely on the knowledge and research techniques of specific disciplines and devotes little attention to teaching students how to teach. Having earned their doctorates without the benefit of solid pedagogical training, many college faculty members end up simply emulating the professors who taught them best, which leaves them repeating the instructional methods of the past rather than adopting effective new approaches.