Seven Principles for Good Practice Game

The Seventh Annual TNT Institute began Thursday morning in Dickinson Hall, on the Metro campus of FDU. After registration and welcome remarks by Catherine Kelley and Sandra Selick, we played a problem-solving game called “Seven Principles for Good Practice.” This activity was based on the article “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, which appeared in the AAHE Bulletin in 1987.

The game consisted of a scoring sheet and the presentation of short video clips from a number of vintage (?) popular films. The activity asked participants to identify which principle for good practice in undergraduate education could best be discussed using that video clip as an example for discussion. In other words, the underlying task was to interpret how a particular video clip could be a good example of good practice, and thus lead to a better understanding of the seven principles.

Chickering and Gamson’s paper inspired a subsequent article by Chickering and Stephen Ehrmann, “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” which focused on integrating technology into the educational practices that the earlier research report presented. Chickering and Ehrmann point out that technology is not a substitute for good teaching; rather, it is a means to supplement or extend effective teaching practices.