Comedian Steve Martin once said that teaching is like show business. I try to keep this in mind when I’m giving college lectures. But what happens when the entertaining professor gets upstaged by a ...

January 29, 2026 - In 1985, Merryl Goldberg went to the Soviet Union and met The Phantom Orchestra. To help them she made up a secret code, hidden in sheet music. When I first went to a free yoga ...

Lately when I talk with faculty members about their courses and classrooms, I often have to say something that few of them want to hear: Your undergraduates need you to teach them “studenting” skills.

I have now been teaching at Duke University for 20 years. I have been through all kinds of teaching fads—active learning, team-based learning, alternative grading, service learning, etc. You might ...

In today’s classrooms, teaching Black history has become a challenge at best—and a dangerous proposition at worst. In many states, politicians have demanded teachers alter their curriculum over fears ...

One of the first lessons I learned when I began teaching was to “overplan.” Assume that your lesson is going to be done early and have a related activity ready to go. However, like many important ...

“Thank you so much for taking the time to treat me like a person,” wrote Stephanie in an email to me. A student in one of my online courses, she had fallen behind and couldn’t see a way forward — ...