Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 21, Number 1

I expected that there might be a learning curve in the classroom, but none quite like what I experienced. Having a teacher education background and having taught graduate-level courses as an adjunct, I never believed "teaching" would be a problem for me. However, I quickly moved from being a facilitator of learning to a disseminator of information. Because I was attempting to be "all knowing," I spent countless hours reading through the text, reading supplemental articles, and anticipating questions that almost never surfaced. I placed guiding students through the learning process on the back burner. When students struggled with understanding the course content, instead of thinking differently about how I would approach the topic, I would go learn more about it. I was perplexed as to why they did not "get it." This feeling was compounded by that fact that I found myself surrounded by colleagues who had taught these courses before. (Pichon, in this issue, p. 12)