Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 10, Number 1

The isolated nature of teaching is a mixed state. On the one hand, it allows the privacy and intimacy of the individual classroom and supports the intellectual freedom of each professor. On the other hand, it can be lonely to work separately from colleagues. Unfortunately, the isolation of the classroom eliminates what can be useful feedback from peers and students. Colleagues in departments engage in research seminars, but it is unusual to hold a teaching seminar. Someone once said that in this respect teaching is like sex: There is no way to compare your work with that of others. Without knowing what their colleagues are doing in their classrooms and without independent student feedback, teachers cannot be certain how their efforts "rate" in facilitating their students' learning. Could we be doing something better? As Robert Burns wrote over 200 years ago, knowing how we are perceived can "frae mony a blunder free us."