Michelle Medintz spent at least $5,000 in 2022 alone, largely on books. She created a 'cozy corner' in her classroom with shelves filled with books, cushions on the floor, and stuffed animals. 'That doesn't make me a better teacher than my colleagues,' Medintz said.
Gathering training feedback is crucial because it shows whether your L&D initiatives are actually making a difference. While attendance metrics and completion rates give you surface-level insights, authentic feedback reveals how learners felt, what they understood, and which areas they struggled with. Feedback also identifies gaps between desired outcomes and real-world results.
This is a striking decision at a moment when public confidence in higher education is eroding. It is also puzzling because rigorous research and evaluation have demonstrated, over and over, the value of the work of centers for teaching and learning, including positive impacts on student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness and faculty development.
When we look more closely at how and why organizations actually invest in these systems, we can see that the popularity of adaptive learning has far less to do with pedagogical ambition and far more to do with operational pressure. Understanding this gap between how adaptive learning is marketed and how it is used in practice is critical for organizations trying to decide whether it is the right approach for their learning needs.
The most exciting moments for a teacher come when students stumble onto something unexpected-when they run to my office to tell me about a new twist in their thinking about birds in Sula or the discovery of yet another biblical reflection in Housekeeping. Those revelations come only when they survey the text as it is, not as they assume it to be.
Like most Americans, my view of homeschooling was framed through the lens of abnormality. My own public-school education was my only frame of reference. Although my own experience wasn't great, it was familiar. It was the system I knew. As a college professor, I regularly saw the academic gaps my students carried with them from their public-school education. Yet even then, I struggled to imagine an alternative. My instinct was always to fix the existing system, not step outside of it.
