By Matt Reed. Yesterday's staff meeting was small -- five of us in the room -- but it started with a moment of silence in memory of the people killed at Umpqua Community College. More...

By Matt Reed. A new correspondent writes:
I have been thinking of going back to school for and Ed.D to teach college in a teacher education program or maybe a MS in chemistry to teach at a community college. I'm trying to decide what to do and what would be best for me. More...

By Matt Reed. In my radio days, a “collision mix” happened when two songs played back to back that had no business playing back to back. Sometimes the mismatch was lyrical, sometimes musical, but the effect was jarring. More...

By Matt Reed. In response to the piece about a “few, big, dumb questions” approach to assessment earlier this week, an exasperated professor from another state wrote to mention his frustration at the time that assessment takes, and at the unwillingness to act on the consistent finding that one professor’s students underperform everyone else’s. More...

By Matt Reed. How do you know if a curriculum is working?
In the absence of some sort of assessment, too often, the answer was “because the people teaching it say so.” One would think that the conflict of interest there would be obvious; for anyone outside the given department, it usually was. More...