What many professors don't talk about

Mary Churchill of Queens College laments how seldom professors -- who are paid to teach -- actually talk about teaching:

We don’t talk much about teaching in academia, and that’s a problem. Our silence makes it difficult for junior faculty and others teaching their first courses to raise issues and ask questions. Teaching is rarely a topic at faculty senate meetings, where professors are more likely to debate parking rates than teaching methods. A colleague I talked to recently referred to this as the “invisibility” of teaching at our institutions. We reflected on the irony of this, since both of us believe that the main point of education is teaching and learning.

Individually, most of us take teaching very seriously, but as a group, we tend to ignore it. The prioritizing of research over teaching at many of our institutions just reinforces this invisibility.

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