Preserving course materials - including the syllabus, assignment sheets, notes about what you did to set up that best ever in-class discussion -- is absolutely the best action current faculty members and teaching assistants can take to further develop their own best teaching practices and to share ideas about teaching with future groups of teachers. Preserving and sharing best teaching practices not only helps foster conversation about teaching right now, the on-going collection of materials also provides next year's new teachers with a base from which to design courses and materials of their own. This checklist narrative includes "how to" ideas and points toward other programs that have designed resources for preserving and passing along practices.

Preserving class materials is the easiest thing we can do as teachers interested in the on-going professional development of faculty and graduate students within our own departments. Preservation is as easy as asking each person teaching a particular course to place a copy of each course handout in a folder marked with the course title/number, teachers, and semester taught; that folder can live in one person's office mail box, in a shelf in a common area, in a file cabinet set aside for archiving teaching materials; in a Web site established for teachers of that course. Taking the sharing a step further, a group of teachers might ask that items placed in this shared course folder be accompanied by a short annotation setting up the context, student responses and any reconsiderations the teacher has in mind as she puts the assignment into the course folder.

In order to share a broader range of ideas about teaching, departments might also add a teaching page to existing departmental home pages. These pages might include, for example, sections devoted to basic information a new teacher might need (responsibilities and resources of individual support staff member; fast links to WebCT set up, information about ordering textbooks, setting up library reserve texts, and requesting desk copies). For a sample page with this design, see the UM English Department, located on our Resources page.

TA supervisors and others involved in the professional development of instructional staff often create handouts to be distributed to teaching assistants working in their courses or taking teaching-related seminars. Rather than limit the circulation of those materials to a small circle of colleagues, the department chair or coordinator of new teacher orientation/professional development might ask for copies of such materials to be made available to the department as a whole. To foster this exchange, one link on the department's teaching-related web page might take browsers to a "Resources" or "Teaching Ideas" page where these handouts can be housed. The University of Iowa Center for Teaching hosts such a page; to access it, see our Resources page.

Three invaluable electronic publications for people interested in sharing and preserving best teaching practices - of depatments, of fields, and of college educators in general - are The National Teaching and Learning Forum, The Teaching Professor, and Essays on Teaching Excellence. Find them under the "Newsletters and Essays" section on the navigation bar to your left. Finally, the University of Kansas-Lawrence provides links to the many teaching centers across the U.S. and around the world. You can access their site from our Resources page.