Stephen J. Ressler

The Assessment of Teaching

The role of the teacher in the classroom carries tremendous responsibility. A group of students that can range from a half-dozen to several hundred depend on their professor to provide structure to a body of knowledge, to guide the learning process, to convey difficult subjects in a clear manner, to lead the classroom and out-of-class activities so that student time is used efficiently, and to provide a course of instruction in which the students can successfully complete the learning objectives. And somehow, the teacher is expected to establish some rapport with these students along the way. How does the teacher know when he or she is doing well? And how does someone who oversees a program know that the program’s faculty members are teaching at an appropriate standard? This Teaching Lessons Learned installment attempts to answer these questions, using tools and techniques currently in use at the U.S. Military Academy as illustrations.

Developing Information Technology Infrastructure and Civil Engineering Education at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan

This paper describes the ongoing development and implementation of a civil engineering program and supporting information technology infrastructure at the newly created National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA) in Kabul. We present a general model for educational capacity-building and apply it to both the information technology infrastructure and civil engineering program development projects at NMAA. We demonstrate how the use of this model facilitated substantive, well-coordinated progress toward the achievement of project goals. We conclude with lessons learned from our experiences in Afghanistan-lessons that are applicable to educational capacity-building in other areas of the developing world as well.