The folks behind Eager Mondays have ten academic degrees among us and decades of experience in higher education as students, faculty, and staff members.  We are, in short, your people.

If your unit, department, college, or university needs assistance with improving learning or instruction, we’re here to help.  Our goal is always to make instructors more thoughtful about teaching, but this desire stretches to staff trainers as well as teaching faculty and graduate students.  We have worked with universities as diverse as the University of California, Davis; the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan; and Kyushu University in Japan.

We encourage you to contact us to discuss your vision of what a renewed focus on teaching and learning would look like in your workplace, campus, or community.

In particular, however, we have expertise in establishing and running a teaching center, creating a collegial corps of graduate student instructors that provides peer advising, and helping individual instructors and departments move beyond the tyranny of content and coverage to student-centered classrooms.  We can show you how to use both traditional teaching technologies (e.g. the blackboard) in concert with new media to craft learning communities of engaged students who not only remember what you taught them, but also want to put it into practice in the future.

If there’s one word that drives me crazy, it’s “trainer.”  When other professional development companies say they have “experienced trainers” or “certified trainers,” all I can think about is dog training, specifically obedience school and clicker training.

Do your “training” sessions make your employees want to plot your untimely death?  (We can fix that.)

Training does not leave room for thoughtfulness, for individuality, for learning styles–but teaching does.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Training shows employees how to use database software to enter data into the fields of an existing database. Teaching shows people how to design a database to best meet the needs of an organization as it grows, and helps them think more strategically about ways to use and display all of that captured information. Teaching assumes employees are intelligent and creative; training assumes employees all need to develop the same, very well-defined skill set with a narrow range of applications.

At Eager Mondays, we don’t train people; we teach them, and in so doing, help them become better, more thoughtful learners who can rise to whatever challenges confront them.

Need to detox from a bad training experience? Feel free to share your training horror stories in the comments and let us know how teaching would have been a better approach.