Less is more. By now you have heard this mantra from a variety of sources and hopefully one of them was CT+LE. But how can we use this to make our teaching lives more productive and efficient. Remember, the bottom line on teaching is doing everything you can to enhance the learning by your students. There is a terrific op-ed by Peter Bregman that informs our post today. He tells us that we should read two lists everyday as we begin our work. We are modifying his suggestion to make it pertinent to the education field. First make a list of what is important in your class. What is it that you want your students to be able to do when they complete your course? What should they understand and be able to apply? What information will enhance their lives? As Bregman suggests (and we concur), design your class around the things on this list. Now make a second list and place the things that you should avoid. This is the place where you might want to remind yourself not to stand and lecture for 50 minutes or not to put questions on the test about items you failed to discuss. This is the list that you want to use to remind yourself of the habits that are self-defeating or about the time wasters in your life (staring blankly at the Web for hours or stewing over one bad student rating in a class of 35). Sometimes the things we miss (or ignore) put us in the spot to see and hear the things that will make us successful. The trick (if there is one) is to look at the lists each day as you get started. When you are building your course, take a look at the lists. Organization is a good thing and can save us copious amounts of time even if it appears they are time-consumers at the start. The summer is a good time to begin this exercise. Remember, in order for things to become a habit, we need to start doing them on a consistent basis. Habits aren't necessarily bad so let's start some good habits as we look to the Fall 2012 semester and beyond. Have you thought about flipping your class? This has nothing to do with gymnastics, although the Summer Olympics are coming up. It also does not have anything to do with buying a rundown house, repair it and selling it quickly (although it might be a way to help our rapidly diminishing retirement funds). Flipping the classroom is very much about creating a student-centered course. It involves student's taking ownership of their academic experience. We have written about this concept in the past and provided you with some resources. Now you can plan to attend a session on this important topic at the annual Faculty Development Blastoff to be held August 21. The staff of CT+LE has just returned from the TFDN annual conference held in nearby Kingwood. In addition to presenting some of our own scholarship, we learned a number of new things from our colleagues and will be sharing some of that in workshop session planned for the next academic year. In the meantime, if you are looking for some student-centered learning experiences, formative assessment methods, or just some advice about teaching and learning, do not hesitate to contact us. Finally, we wanted to introduce you to a new feature that you will see very soon on the blog. We are going to be adding book reviews to our toolbox. If you are interested in writing a brief review about a book you have recently read or if you would like to review a book from the CT+LE collection, please let us know. Obviously the books we are looking for must be related to the scholarship of teaching and learning in some way.