in this issue The Art and Crafl of Good Teaching

A well-taught chemistry course is the result of many di- verse and well-applied skills and talents of the teacher. The most exciting lectures and interesting laboratories will not suffice if the course is not structured so students see the relationships among the things they are learning. The most carefully designed syllabus will fail if the teacher does not have the ability to hold his or her students' atten- tion and interest. ~ o ~ e i h e r these elements of a successful class require that the teacher have not only knowledge and nrnctical skills but also intanlrible traits that can he de- r - - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ----- ~~ ~

scribed as the ar t and craft oFgood teaching. While each issue of the Journal contains articles that aid in increasing knowledge and practical skills, this issue also contains sev- eral articles that address the more intaneible aspects of good teaching.

Part of this intaneible Drocess is the craft that goes into ~ - . successful classroom presentations. Not something that can be learned bv rote because each lecturer must develop a style that is appropriate to his or her personality, teach- inn aDDroach. and students. the craft of lecturing, however, - .. can be developed fmm some common preceptsrA teacher with a reputation for skillfull and exciting lectures, Glenn Crosby (page 433) shares his thoughts on the craR of lec- turing. He points out that many of the classic works advis- ing on verbal communication are written by people in the humanities; he offers his version tailored to the teacher of science. His first advice is to know oneself; next one must know the subject: then one must know the students. He then turns mihe lecture itself, asking questions and pre- senting considerations that must be addressed to get m u - imum&ctiveness from the lecture process.

If knowing oneself is the first step to good teaching, Bowen's article (page 479) presents some of the issues that must be examined to attain this self-awareness. Startine with the oremise that teachers use. often uncon- ~~~~ ~~~~ - sciously, their per;onal epistemologies, myths, and me&- ~ h o r s when thev formulate theories of teaching and desim iheir classes, he shows the effects of different attitudes. He eives hvoothetical statements from two teachers about the ilasses"<hey are teaching. He then analyzes these two very different views to show how each teacher's internal myths and metaphors have structured their experience.

Knowing one's students is as important as knowing one- self. Students may have views of the learning process that are very different from those of their teacher and from those of their fellow students. It is easy for teachers to as- sume that students expect to see the connections among the information and ideas presented and that they will ac- tivelv attempt to intemate the material into a coherent - ntructure. In reality, many students use rote memorization to assimilate the materials, not because they are lazy or

fearful. but because thev literallv assume that is the onlv way to learn. Ebenezer (page 464) examines current re- search on how humans learn concents and a ~ ~ l i e s them to . . teaching chemistry He defmes Ausubel's theories regard- ing meaningful versus rote learning and shows how to use concept maps to integrate information. Then he turns to the &e of &win's "howledge V" to illustrate how new knowledge is constructed in laboratom teachinc.

Armed-with a better understanding of themselves and their students. teachers can then consider more specific questions about their courses-such as what to cover and how to evaluate the students' ~erformances. The material covered in a @ven course should be related to the needs as well as the abilities of the class: however. i t is not alwavs ~ - - ~~~ ~ ~~ ~

easy to find out what students in a service course will ac- tually use in their future professions. Walhout and Hein- schel (page 483) relate these difficulties specifically in re- gard td tge course for nurses. The profe&onal nursing groups give little input, deferring to the chemistry depart- ments, whose faculty do not always feel confident that they are makina the best selection of topics. The authors de- cided to go'birectly to the end users and surveyed both fac- ulty in nursing schools and practicing nurses in their own county. From the results, they achieved a better under- standing of nurses'needs as well as some insight into how topics should be related to the nursing profession in class. - ~

Much has been written about using interesting material that will illustrate the "real world" use of chemistri. Few of the suggested examples, however, show a conneckon to the humanities. Beilby (page 437) points out, however, that two liberal arts fields-art and archeaology--are rife with fascinating applications of analytical techniques. He provides a list of topics and literature references to some of the more interesting detective work performed by chemists who authenticate and date artifacts such as the one on this month's cover.

The teacher who has carefullv examined his or her own strengths and weaknesses, evaiuated the students needs, and desiened and taught and well-conceived course still - - has a final obstacl+the fair assignment of grades. The fairness of grade assignments is viewed fmm two perspec- tives in this issue. Nelson, Varma-Nelson, and Kloempken (page 462) deal with issues of fairness in the the statistical scaling of grades. They present a graphic system which they feel overcomes many of the problems. Stumno ( ~ a w 459) addresses a more fundamental aues- tion: cave'&ding standards been slipping over thebast decades to the point that we are now fooling our students and ourselves with the assigned grades. His comments about the state of education lead us full circle back to the consideration of how well we actually practice the art and craft of good teaching.

432 Journal of Chemical Education