Tis the season to read your student evaluations. What is the best advice? Fellow blogger Dean Dad says to look for outliers. It’s really about spotting the folks who are badly trailing the rest of the pack. Putting much weight on the difference between the lower middle and the upper middle is missing the point. There is a terrific article about residential learning communities that also talks about fostering a sense of community at an institution. Howard Schien says, "Fostering community involves conveying an attitude that this community values intellectual engagement. Fostering community involves incorporating concepts like support, acceptance of difference, the value of lively discourse, and willingness to introduce new ideas into the classroom, into non-credit programming, and into the social structure of students’ everyday lives in the residence hall." Want to attract more majors to your discipline. Offer more courses that utilize active learning methods and engage your students. That is the advice from a report presented at the latest meeting of the American Anthropological Association.