"Current Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and School Improvement" is designed to examine several popular approaches to curriculum and, in the process, to help students develop a better understanding of the theories and rationales that lie behind many of the debates about teaching, learning, and school improvement. Specifically, the goals of the course are to help teachers, researchers, and policymakers to: develop their abilities to examine critically the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to teaching and learning, to explain their implications for policy and practice to different audiences, and to develop, justify and explain their own approaches.

Course Outline: Displays the course syllabus, brief descriptions of each week'sdiscussions, and links to notes, overheads, summaries, and reflections.

Student Projects: Provides a glimpse of the work students completed for the course by focusing on the project (including a videotape of an in-class presentation) of one student. Brief descriptions and excerpts from other student projects and instructor comments are also provided.

Reflections: Contains my general reflections on the development and execution of the course. Key issues include issues of learning (how much can students be expected to learn in one course, with 30 hours of class time?); design (which activities worked?); content (what have I learned about current approaches to teaching and learning?); and the scholarship of teaching (What does the documentation of this course and the development of this site suggest about the scholarship of teaching?)

Index of Materials: Provides a comprehensive set of links to materials referenced throughout the site.

This web site documents a small Seminar with seven master's students taught at Stanford University in the Spring quarter, 2000. The site is intended primarily for my own use: to collect my course materials and reflections in one place and to serve as a foundation for the development of future versions of this and other courses. However, as part of my work with the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it is also intended to act as an example of one of the ways that faculty can use a web-site to document their teaching.

In developing this site, I was particularly concerned with creating a comprehensive site that would make public some of my notes, reflections, and course materials (but not all). Therefore, while all my notes and reflections and most of the student work are stored here for my future use, only some of these materials are available via active links.

I also wanted to demonstrate that this kind of web-based documentation could be done in a relatively short period of time. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that the reflections and summaried that were produced during the course only took about 2 hours a week and became a regular part of my preparations. Although I had never created a web-site before, the basic construction of this site (including gathering, organizing, and refining the text and materials) took about two weeks (working a few hours a day, during a vacation). Completing the layout of the site, creating links, and final corrections and additions took several more days spread out over a period of a month; this final work was made considerably easier by the efforts and assistance of Desiree Pointer (although she insists that I could have done it myself in only slightly more time....)

I welcome any comments you may have on the content or organization of the site. For further information about the use of the web for the scholarship of teaching, please take a look at A Fantasy in Teaching and Learning (a paper I prepared for a recent conference) or the work of the Knowledge Media Lab.