Have you ever heard of the Preparing Future Faculty program? We were invited by Arizona State University's Graduate School to participate in their program which was held today. Five current LU faculty, including Drs. Paul Bernazzani, Brad Mayer, Dorothy Sisk, Amy Smith and Gleb Tcheslavski, presented their views of what it is like to be an academic. Their stories were compelling and very different. The overall themes that emerged included the support from their colleagues, relationship with the local community, and ability to be productive in this environment. All were drawn to LU because of the focus on teaching and they love that the classes are relatively small so that they can concentrate on building relationships with their students. In the end, the ASU audience of graduate students were very appreciative and our faculty enjoyed the experience very much. There is still time to register to attend the Alexander Workshop Revisited Lunch+Learn session to be held on Monday, February 13 at noon. The session will focus on extending the conversation that started last Monday and filling in the gaps for those who were unable to attend the original workshop. If you are looking for a concise research article that can help you improve your teaching performance, we recommend "Factors Contributing to Improved Teaching Performance." Whitney Ransom McGowan and Charles R. Graham performed a study designed to gain a better understanding of how faculty members become better teachers and make improvements in their teaching. Their results revealed that the top three factors leading to improvement were active/practical learning, teacher/student interactions, and clear expectations/learning outcomes. They also provide practical applications for change. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and have written a new book called We're Losing Our Minds that focuses on the quality of learning. Unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers. Instead, they make the case that too little of what happens in institutions of "higher education" deserves to be called "higher learning" -- "learning that prepares students to think creatively and critically, communicate effectively, and excel in responding to the challenges of life, work and citizenship." Keeling and Hersh engage in a dense but important discussion about how such development learning occurs. But, perhaps recognizing that the sort of "rethinking" they propose would require the sort of "systemic institutional change" that is difficult to bring about in higher education, the authors spend much of their time laying out the sorts of discussions in which campus administrators and professors must engage, jointly, to decide to make learning the "touchstone" priority, and kinds of practices and approaches that colleges might adopt to make it so.