If you are looking for a way to create a learning experience that emphasizes personal responsibility and collaboration while helping your students develop critical thinking and communication skills, this idea might be right for you. Assign two research essays for the semester. The first should be fairly early in the semester and needs to be an individual assignment typically on a smaller issue of a larger topic. Have your students submit the essay for a grade and provide them with detailed feedback (which will come into play later). The second essay should be a group project. You will need to group students using their smaller issues into the larger topic collaborative groups. One of the components of the grading for the larger topic essay is to look at how well they integrated the feedback from the smaller issue essay. Remember to include a rubric for each of the essays. These learning experiences simulate real-world experiences as most of them will be called upon to execute very similar tasks when they join the workforce. It seems even places like Johns Hopkins University have caught on to the fact that teaching is integral to a student's college experience. Of course we are being sardonic, but a recent article about a new initiative at the institution known for its research prowess caught our eye. Here is one of the more interesting comments, "During a student panel, Hopkins professors asked their pupils what they needed from a lecture course. The aspiring scientists said personal interaction, genuine interest in the students and varied lesson plans are vital." Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers and advocates for higher education. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, according to a report by the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability. The report stakes out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results. Dr. Patricia Alexander, who will visit LU on February 6, proposes that "we reframe education as academic development, a reframing that demands meaningful attention to the socioemotional and physical well-being of all students as much as to their cognitive growth and advancement." You can find this and more in her most recent article Through Myth to Reality: Reframing Education as Academic Development published in the journal Early Education and Development (21,5). Better yet, plan to participate in a campus discussion at her faculty development workshop. Registration is now open.