On the top of the last page of the Denver and the West section of the Denver Post, there is a quote from William Bonfils the founder of the paper, "There is no hope for the satisfied man". I am not much for personal credos or personal mission statements. I tend to find them somewhat parochial, unimaginative, and unoriginal. However, if I were to subscribe to a personal credo Mr. Bonfils' is about as close of a match I could find. It reminds me to cognizant in always searching for a new…

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One of the most important skills faculty can elucidate to students is skills they can apply in their professional lives. Education is more than the teaching of esoteric concepts (thought these are important), education is also a vehicle that can provide the opportunity for upward economic and social mobility. Although many students are already in the workforce, many are not, and of those who are in the workforce are often seeking new careers or are pursuing educational endeavors for positions…

How are your Bible skills?  Being an instructor with the College of Theology, one of the biggest things that I see as I teach classes here at GCU is that a lot of students do not know how find certain things in the Bible and they do not know how to use the Bible.  Through these blogs I am trying to provide as many spiritual tools to help the student and the instructor with guidance in this area.  I was recently asked by a student to give her a tool to help find scripture passages because she…

I was recently watching an Aspen Ideas Festival session about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, and it made me think about the tradeoffs we as faculty need to make daily within our classrooms. I think education, as with many other occupations, is a tradeoff-centric position. We need to balance our needs and sanity with the needs and desires of our students. Specifically, this can relate to the grading of assignments as well as the application of policies within the classroom setting.

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A key skill that every college student must learn is the ability to research information effectively. Colleges correctly place a heavy emphasis on the need for students to learn and practice this skill throughout their studies. Why? Because graduates who have strong research skills are less swayed by the ebb and flow of "the next best idea". They are able to sift through the plethora of information that now exists at our fingertips, analyze it, and come up with an educated decision on what to…

Leadership is a difficult quality to quantify given all of the different types of matrixes one could apply in this area. In certain circumstances, leadership depends on the situation in which various types of leadership skills are pertinent whereas others are superfluous. There is also the issue of location, as what constitutes quality leadership may depend on the nation-state location, cultural proclivities, and the skill level of the team one is leading. The type of industry can additionally…

One of the truths about people is that incentives help compel us to perform our tasks, whether nuanced or mundane, for survival or banal reasons. In other words, we work because we believe there will be some type of reward as Easterly (2002) noted, "people respond to incentives" (p. 27). Hence, if certain tasks, behaviors, or functions receive incentives, people will work toward adapting themselves to better perforce the task, exhibit the behavior, or perform the function. This does not entail…

Experiential learning can be an effective method for helping students' integrate course material into their day-to-day lives. As Beckem and Watkins (2012) noted, experiential learning allows students to actualize the material in a real-world setting, thereby increasing the value and retention of the material. Experiential learning has the potential to help students view course material in a less esoteric manner, which can make said material less daunting and more applicable to a professional…