by our experienced yet anonymous “Points of View” professor

I like to try new experiences in my classroom. Sometimes I ask students to work in groups to research questions and summarize their findings in oral presentations. Sometimes I use a canned talk with PowerPoint slides. Sometimes I come to class ill-prepared, and other times I’ve spent hours working on a lecture that maps everything to Bloom’s taxonomy and clearly identifies my learning objectives and rubrics for student assessment. But at the end of all of this experimentation, I’m still left wondering whether it’s pedagogy or charisma that results in my accolades as a teacher.