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Teaching and Learning STEM
By Richard M. Felder, Rebecca Brent · 2024
Jossey Bass
In Teaching and Learning STEM, well-known STEM education authorities Dr. Richard Felder and Dr. Rebecca Brent outline a research-proven, learner-centered approach to STEM instruction that has been shown to advance a broad range of learning outcomes and increase retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The book is written for teachers at the university, community college, and high school levels.
Critical Teaching Behaviors
Defining, Documenting, and Discussing Good Teaching
By Lauren Barbeau, Claudia Cornejo Happel, and Nancy Chick · 2023
Routledge
What does “good” teaching mean, and how can we know it when we see it? Perhaps you have grappled with these questions at some point in your career, either as an instructor wanting to document or grow your teaching effectiveness or as a peer or administrator trying to provide guidance to or assess the teaching of others.

This book serves three purposes: a condensed, evidence-based guide to effective teaching; a resource on creating a focused teaching narrative and teaching portfolio; and a toolkit that equips faculty to conduct peer observations, student midterm feedback, and productive conversations related to teaching.

The first part of the book offers a rich guide as to what constitutes effective teaching based on a comprehensive review of the research on instructional strategies and behaviors that promote student engagement, learning, and success. It includes practical advice flexible enough to accommodate disciplinary and contextual differences, recognizing that readers will want to adapt effective behaviors based on their values and dispositions. The opening chapters successively cover aligning classroom activities to learning goals; teaching inclusively to account for students’ prior learning and diversity; creating an environment that promotes students’ active engagement in learning and taking responsibility for their intellectual development; assessing students’ progress and adjusting teaching accordingly; using technology effectively; and finally engaging in reflective self-assessment with feedback from peers and students to adjust and develop teaching skills.

In the second part of the book, the authors offer structured guidance on developing a focused teaching narrative, gathering peer and student feedback to support that narrative, and curating a portfolio to showcase exemplary practices and achievements. The insights and tools presented also equip readers to facilitate classroom peer observations and gather midterm student feedback. Overall, the second part of the book provides readers with a common language and tools to use when discussing teaching with peers and those who may formally or informally observe their teaching. The book builds to providing the reader with a clear sense of the criteria and evidence needed to document their teaching for the purposes of annual review, promotion, or tenure.

The now widely recognized Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) framework offers a holistic means of documenting and assessing teaching effectiveness by including a variety of evidence and perspectives. The comprehensive feedback and documentation toolkit aligned to the framework incorporates more of the instructor’s perspective on their own teaching into the evaluation process and substitutes for or supplements student evaluations of teaching (SETs). Administrators will also find the CTB useful as a template and guide for the objective evaluation of teaching.

In a single volume, this book offers faculty evidence-based guidance and encouragement to explore effective teaching strategies whether they are just embarking on their college teaching journey or are experienced instructors looking to explore new ideas. The CTB presents instructors a roadmap to both developing teaching skills and demonstrating achievements in promoting student learning to advance their careers. It is designed to be an interactive workbook. While readers can choose to read passively, they will get the most value from this book by completing the prompts and activities along the way.
Educator's Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises
The Allure of Play
By Joe Bisz and Victoria L. Mondelli · 2023
Teachers College Press
Every educator’s imaginative instincts will be guided by this book’s practical design method, which harnesses the power of play for student learning. Teachers from all disciplines and levels can create a full spectrum of engaging exercises through the authors’ six accessible ALLURE steps:

Ask where to apply the play.

List the mental moves.

Link the mental moves to the play.

Understand how the learning principles operate.

Run the activity-game.

Evaluate the learner experience.

Along with principles from game-based learning pedagogy, readers will explore a framework of original complex mechanic teaching templates that will help their fledgling instructional activities cross the bridge into fully formed games. Beginners and veterans will find multiple entry points, from adding a single playful element (student roles in discussions) to more elaborate designs (riddles and simulations). They will also learn different levels of producing physical tabletop components (cards, boards, plastic pieces) or light digital options (discussion board riddles, Google Slides games). Born from the authors’ extensive experiences running professional development workshops, this guide has been frequently requested by classroom teachers, college instructors, librarians, and instructional designers. While examples are all drawn from secondary and higher education environments, the ALLURE method is also being used in workshops with elementary-level teachers, including homeschool instructors; business trainers; and digital and analogue game designers.

Book Features:
  • Offers hands-on, practical advice about how to be more playful with your students, with a focus on nondigital activities and games.
  • Written in the language of instructional design, so advanced knowledge about games or technology is not required.
  • Provides creative instructional techniques that will boost student engagement for both in-person and online instruction.
  • Includes more than two dozen original illustrations and designs to aid understanding.
  • Addresses the need for accessible, inclusive learning environments.

    To obtain a set of flashcards that summarize the book’s concepts, or to read about other resources, see the authors’ website.
The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching
By Isis Artze-Vega, Flower Darby, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad · 2023
Norton
Written by renowned teaching and learning experts, this guide offers concrete steps to help any instructor striving to ensure that all students—and, in particular, historically underserved students—have an equal chance for success. Here you’ll find actionable tips, grounded in research, for teaching college classes online, in person, and everywhere in between.
Teaching for Quality Learning at University
5th edition
By John Biggs, Catherine Tang, and Gregor Kennedy · 2022
McGraw-Hill Education
The concept of constructive alignment has supported generations of students and teachers within higher education. It is a ‘backward design’ method of teaching where the student outcomes are identified first and the teacher then designs teaching activities to enable students to achieve those outcomes, assessing how well they have been achieved. Each chapter outlines how to design the learning outcomes, teaching and assessments for success in learning.

This updated edition of Teaching for Quality Learning at University:
  • Provides a comprehensive, research-based theory of teaching for teacher reflection
  • Outlines how educational technology can be used in constructively aligned teaching
  • Helps staff developers to provide support for staff and departments in line with institutional policies
  • Offers a framework for quality assurance and quality enhancement across a whole institution
Teaching for Quality Learning at University continues to be used as a framework for designing higher education teaching systems globally and is essential reading for those in the field.
The Real World of College
What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be
By Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner · 2022
MIT Press
For The Real World of College, Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don't belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission.

Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what Fischman and Gardner call “higher education capital”—to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings.
Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning
Structuring Student Voice into Higher Education
By Alison Cook-Sather · 2022
Harvard Education Press
Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning invites readers to help forge a more inclusive and accessible college education by incorporating student voices via pedagogical partnerships.

Alison Cook-Sather, a pioneer of this co-creative approach, draws on more than twenty years of experience developing student–teacher partnerships in higher education to offer a wise and generous work that speaks to both students and educators. As her research underscores, a co-creative learning environment, in which relationships and communication between students and teachers are prioritized, benefits the educational experience on many levels.

Cook-Sather demonstrates how pedagogical partnerships give students the tools to advocate for their own learning while giving educators the feedback they need to improve classroom experiences. She shows how the co-creative model helps to bring about inclusive spaces and equitable teaching practices that better foster student success, especially among underrepresented and minority student populations.

Offering actionable guidance, Cook-Sather advocates enacting the following four principles to structure student voice into higher education: embracing a commitment to equity and justice; providing structure rather than prescriptions for engagement; making rather than taking up space; and developing a partnership mindset. She grounds these principles in examples of practices drawn from an undergraduate education course; a faculty development program; and cross-disciplinary, cross-constituency institutional dialogues.

This work calls for readers to reimagine the higher education structure and to cultivate an environment in which all stakeholders can work together to advance inclusivity, accessibility, and equity. As the author argues, co-creation can be a catalyst for change throughout the system.
Responsible Pedagogy
Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education
By Eric Detweiler · 2022
Penn State University Press
In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers.

Responsible Pedagogy makes a fresh case for the importance and value of public higher education and the work of teaching. In making this case, Eric Detweiler surveys the history of rhetoric and writing in postsecondary education, looking in particular at the teacher-student relationship. He finds that from the Socratic method to medieval exercises, from MOOCs to remote, asynchronous learning, the balance of authority and agency in the classroom is often precarious. But the problem goes deeper. Underlying both authority and agency is the value of mastery, which the teacher is to impart to the student. It is this emphasis on mastery, Detweiler argues, that distorts the proper relation between the student and teacher, a relationship in which they are responsible for and vulnerable to each other.

Drawing on contemporary ethics, rhetorical theory, and critiques of practices in the online classroom, Detweiler develops a pedagogy of responsibility and shows how it can be applied in writing and communication curricula, assignments, and teacher-student interactions. Rehabilitating the proper role of the teacher, Responsible Pedagogy calls into question our newfound trust in educational technology and points the way to a better, more effective pedagogy.
What Teaching Looks Like
Higher Education Through Photographs
By Cassandra Volpe Horii and Martin Springborg · 2022
Elon University Center for Engaged Learning
What Teaching Looks Like delves into higher education—the challenges faced by students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike from all variety of institution types and across campus sectors—in a way that has not been done before. By weaving together a unique collection of documentary photographs of modern teaching and learning at US colleges and universities with research-based discussion of the state of engaged learning, the book teaches readers to think through and with photographs in new ways, offering insights and perspectives with the potential to change teaching, administrative, and support practices for the better. The project not only reflects the state of how US institutions educate the next generation of thinkers and innovators, it informs what we could aspire to do as educators and reveals experiences and perspectives of today’s students in ways that are only accessible through photographs.

Open access digital edition: download for free at the "Buy book" link below.
The New College Classroom
By Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis · 2022
Harvard University Press
College instruction is stuck in the past. If a time traveler from a century ago arrived on today’s campuses, they would recognize only too well the listlessness of the lecture hall and the awkward silence of the seminar room. Yet we know how to do better. Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, two of the world’s foremost innovators in higher education, turn to the latest research and methods to show how teachers at every kind of institution can help students become independent, creative, and active learners.

The New College Classroom helps instructors in all disciplines create an environment that is truly conducive to learning. Davidson and Katopodis translate cutting-edge research in learning science and pedagogy into ready-to-use strategies to incorporate into any course. These empirically driven, classroom-tested techniques of active learning—from the participatory syllabus and ungrading to grab-and-go activities for every day of the term—have achieved impressive results at community colleges and research universities, on campus, online, and in hybrid settings.

Extensive evidence shows that active-learning tools are more effective than conventional methods of instruction. Davidson and Katopodis explain how and why their approach works and provide detailed case studies of educators successfully applying active-learning techniques in their courses every day, ensuring that their students are better prepared for the world after college.
UDL University
Designing for Variability Across the Curriculum
By Randy Laist, Dana Sheehan, and Nicole Brewer · 2022
CAST
In this lively collection, 16 educators from Goodwin University, a career-focused institution serving a highly diverse student community, share their experiences of applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to their instructional practice. From the sciences to the humanities to vocational technologies, these professors share practical tips and insights, and offer glimpses into their own journeys as learners, too.
Reigniting Curiosity and Inquiry in Higher Education
A Realist's Guide to Getting Started with Inquiry-Based Learning
By Stacey L. MacKinnon and Beth Archer-Kuhn · 2022
Stylus
How do you develop students’ capacities as independent learners, build their confidence and motivation to identify their own research agendas, and facilitate their critical thinking and research skills for effectively exploring their chosen topic? Inquiry-based learning (IBL) offers a proven means to achieve these outcomes.

IBL is a scaffolded learner-centered, student-led approach to inquiry whereby students progressively design and lead their own inquiry process, with support from the instructor. It’s a powerful pedagogical approach that you can progressively adopt, first adopting it as an activity in a course to develop you and your students’ comfort with the practice, right up to developing an entire course or program utilizing IBL. It offers varying levels of engagement as you and your students gain familiarity with the practice, from the instructor providing structured support, to formative guidance as students gain confidence, to a point where students become increasingly self-directed and independent and are supported by the review of student peers and validated by presentations of their work to the class. This pedagogy shifts the student/instructor relationship, with the former leading and the latter supporting.

IBL is a flexible teaching and learning approach that be can progressively adopted and developed without a specific formula, and that positions students as co-constructors of knowledge, rather than passive recipients. It is student-driven, creates engagement, develops a curiosity mindset, promotes group learning that is collaborative rather than competitive, fosters metacognition, and builds confidence as students learn to deal with ambiguity and risk.
The New Science of Learning
How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain, 3rd edition
By Todd D. Zakrajsek · 2022
Stylus
By introducing new concepts, strategies, and applications related to learning and memory that are based on current findings in cognitive, social, and motivational psychology, this text offers a richer and more complete picture of how brain science illuminates how we learn. Students assigned this book will be equipped to design effective learning plans, employ new strategies, recognize learning traps, discover ways to work effectively in groups, improve recall, and realize better academic performance through test-taking and paper-writing strategies.

This new edition also addresses the concerns of all students—particularly those unfamiliar with the college setting and its expectations and assumptions—and offers strategies for success. In keeping with the preceding editions, this book introduces students to concepts, techniques, strategies, tips, and ideas to help them be academically stronger students, advance faster in their studies, and demonstrate what they have learned more effectively—in short, how anyone can learn to be a better learner by learning how to learn in harmony with their brain.
Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom
Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work
By Carol A. Hurney, Christine Rener, and Jordan D. Troisi · 2022
Stylus
This book is about using the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID) method to make improvements to the educational experience midcourse. The idea is to use this structured interview process to involve students in helping faculty improve a course while they are in it, potentially making a difference for themselves as well as for future students. Faculty gain the opportunity to work on a course before it ends, and can see what changes work without waiting for the next time the course is offered, or the end of semester student evaluations.

SGID is a consultation method developed to collect midsemester feedback from students using structured small and large group conversations, involving four conversations between students, a learned colleague the authors refer to as the SGID consultant, and the instructor. First, student talk with each other in small groups about the learning happening in a course, under the guidance of a consultant (SGID Conversation #1- Student & Students). Then the SGID consultant engages the students in a conversation about how the feedback provided impacts the learning in the course (SGID Conversation #2 - Students & Consultant). Then there is a conversation between the consultant and the instructor, where they discuss how the feedback provided by the students can best inform the pedagogical approaches and strategies used by the instructor (SGID Conversation #3 - Consultant & Instructor). Finally, the instructor closes the feedback loop with a conversation with their students about what they learned and how best to move forward (SGID Conversation #4 - Instructor & Students).

These conversations during the middle of the semester change the way students think about the teaching and learning endeavor, the way instructors perceive the learning challenges of their courses, and the quality of the institutional academic culture. Most importantly, the SGID equips the instructor with the knowledge to make midsemester course corrections that can profoundly impact the ways students navigate the course, communicate with the instructor, and realize the ways effective teaching can enhance learning.
Engaging Virtual Environments
Creative Ideas and Online Tools to Promote Student Interaction, Participation, and Active Learning
By Joanne Ricevuto and Laura McLaughlin · 2022
Stylus
In a classroom setting interaction among students is the norm. How do you replicate that informality, spontaneity, and focus online? This book provides you with a framework to think about the different kinds of engagement you want to foster -- whether participation, collaboration, or quick feedback -- and then introduces you to available online tools, some of which may be in your LMS, offers practical tips, and guides you to how make the most of commonly available technologies to achieve your goals.

Within the context and progression of a course -- from developing a welcome page, presenting yourself and the purpose of your course, to icebreakers, assignments, and alternative forms of assessment -- the authors introduce you to a range of easy-to-use online tools that they have introduced to the faculty and teachers in their classes, and that foster active learning and student engagement. In doing so they provide a checklist that you can also access and print from the Web, to help you review additional tools from the wide and ever-growing range of tools that are available online and determine whether they are appropriate for what you want to accomplish.

This book will help you connect with students, whether you’re teaching synchronously or asynchronously, regardless of the devices students may be using; develop community; and introduce you to gamification to add enjoyment and variety to your students’ experience of your class.

Recognizing that using new tools with confidence requires practice, the authors offer ideas for implementing them in private online spaces. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions that can be addressed individually by the reader or within a learning community to encourage faculty to work together and support each other in virtual teaching and learning. This book addresses the challenge of embracing new models of course offerings to students in the evolving landscape of virtual learning.
Creating Inclusive Online Communities
Practices That Support and Engage Diverse Students
By Sharla Berry · 2022
Stylus
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, online and distance education enrolled over 19 million students in the US. As colleges and universities return to in-person instruction, the number of online courses and programs is poised to grow exponentially. At the same time, institutions of higher education are increasingly more diverse⁠—racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically⁠—with present and future students having a range of intersectional needs related to their cultural backgrounds, gendered experiences, and abilities. Sharla Berry offers faculty practical strategies for building asynchronous, synchronous, and blended online courses and programs that are inclusive and engaging for diverse learners.

Recognizing that community is a complex, contextual and constantly shifting concept, Sharla Berry opens this book by addressing how to develop an inclusive approach to online teaching that takes into account the experiences and needs of historically marginalized and underrepresented students. Covering the affordances and limitations of synchronous and asynchronous teaching, as well as hybrid and fully online instruction, she outlines different approaches to course design, and identifies how to use the myriad functions of learning management systems—from collaborative tools to administering tests—to engage students and assess their involvement and progress.

While primarily designed to provide faculty with practical and actionable ideas and strategies, this book will also prove useful to those that support faculty in cultivating teaching excellence. Administrators, instructional designers, faculty developers and support staff will gain insight into how to support faculty in developing robust and inclusive online courses.
Learning with Others
Collaboration As a Pathway to College Student Success
By Clifton Conrad and Todd Lundberg · 2022
Johns Hopkins University Press
Most American colleges and universities assimilate students into highly competitive undergraduate experiences. By placing achievement for personal and material gain as the bedrock of a college education, these institutions fail to educate students to become collaborative learners: people who are committed and prepared to join with others in developing promising solutions to problems that they share with others.

Drawing on a three-year study of student persistence and learning at Minority-Serving Institutions, Clifton Conrad and Todd Lundberg argue that student success in college should be redefined by focusing on the importance of collaborative learning over individual achievement. Engaging students in shared, real-world problem-solving, Conrad and Lundberg assert, will encourage them to embrace interdependence and to value and draw on diverse perspectives. Learning with Others presents a set of core practices to empower students to enter, nourish, and sustain collaborative learning and outlines how to blend the roles and responsibilities of faculty, staff, and students; how to adopt best practices for receiving and giving feedback on problem-solving; and how to anchor a curriculum in shared problem-solving.

Bringing together lessons learned from more than 300 interviews, along with notes from 14 campus visits, 3 national convenings, and examples from across our nation's colleges and universities, Conrad and Lundberg explore ways in which successful antiracist networks of problem-solvers are learning to contribute to the flourishing of their communities on campus and far beyond. Outlining strategies for identifying and dismantling barriers to participation, Learning with Others will pique interest among faculty, students, and administrators in higher education and a wide range of external stakeholders—from families and communities to policymakers and funders.
Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology
Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World
By Michelle D. Miller · 2022
West Virginia University Press
Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we?

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.
Teaching Matters
A Guide for Graduate Students
By Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong · 2022
West Virginia University Press
In a book written directly for graduate students that includes graduate student voices and experiences, Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong establish why good teaching matters and offer a guide to helping instructors-in-training create inclusive and welcoming classrooms.

Teaching Matters is informed by recent research while being grounded in the personal perspectives of current and past graduate students in many disciplines. Graduate students can use this book independently to prepare to teach their courses, or it can be used as a guide for a teaching practicum. With a just-in-time checklist for graduate students who are assigned to teach courses right before the semester starts, step-by-step directions for writing a compelling teaching philosophy, and an emphasis on teaching well regardless of modality, Teaching Matters will remain relevant for graduate students throughout their careers.
Picture a Professor
Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning
By Jessamyn Neuhaus · 2022
West Virginia University Press
Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.
Inclusive Teaching
Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom
By Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy · 2022
West Virginia University Press
Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy provide tips and advice on how to make all students feel welcome and included. They begin with a framework describing why explicit attention to structure enhances inclusiveness in both course design and interactions with and between students. Inclusive Teaching then provides practical ways to include more voices in a series of contexts: when giving instructions for group work and class activities, holding office hours, communicating with students, and more. The authors finish with an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what evidence to include in a teaching dossier that demonstrates inclusive practices.

The work of two highly regarded specialists who have delivered over a hundred workshops on inclusive pedagogy and who contribute frequently to public conversations on the topic, Inclusive Teaching distills state-of-the-art guidance on addressing privilege and implicit bias in the college classroom. It seeks to provide a framework for individuals and communities to ask, Who is being left behind and what can teachers do to add more structure?
Teaching Gradually
Practical Pedagogy for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students
By Kacie L. Armstrong, Lauren A. Genova, John Wyatt Greenlee, and Derina S. Samuel · 2021
Stylus
Teaching Gradually is a guide for anyone new to teaching and learning in higher education. Written for graduate student instructors, by graduate students with substantive teaching experience, this resource is among the first of its kind to speak to graduate students as comrades-in-arms with voices from alongside them in the trenches, rather than from far behind the lines. Each author featured in this book was a graduate student at the time they wrote their contribution. Consequently, the following chapters give scope to a newer, diverse generation of educators who are closer in experience and professional age to the book’s intended audience. The tools, methods, and ideas discussed here are ones that the authors have found most useful in teaching today’s students. Each chapter offers a variety of strategies for successful classroom practices that are often not explicitly covered in graduate training.

Overall, this book consists of 42 chapters written by 51 authors who speak from a vast array of backgrounds and viewpoints, and who represent a broad spectrum of experience spanning small, large, public, and private institutions of higher education. Each chapter offers targeted advice that speaks to the learning curve inherent to early-career teaching, while presenting tangible strategies that readers can leverage to address the dynamic professional landscape they inhabit. The contributors’ stories and reflections provide the context to build the reader’s confidence in trying new approaches in their his or her teaching.

This book covers a wide range of topics designed to appeal to graduate student instructors across disciplines, from those teaching discussion sections, to those managing studio classes and lab sessions, to those serving as the instructor of record for their own course. Despite the medley of content, two common threads run throughout this volume: a strong focus on diversity and inclusion, and an acknowledgment of the increasing shift to online teaching.
Pocket Guide to Online Teaching
Translating the Evidence-Based Model Teaching Criteria
By Aaron S. Richmond, Guy A. Boysen, and Regan A. R. Gurung · 2021
Routledge
This pithy yet thorough book provides an evidence-based guide on how to prepare for online teaching, especially for those who are making a swift transition from face-to-face to online instruction.

Guided by the Model Teaching Characteristics created by The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, this book covers important topics like: how to adapt to expected and unexpected changes in teaching, how to evaluate yourself and your peers, and tips on working smarter/optimizing working practices with the resources available. The features of the book include:
  • Practical examples exploring how to solve the typical problems of designing and instructing online courses.
  • Interactive "Worked Examples" and "Working Smarter" callouts throughout the book which offer practical demonstrations to help teachers learn new skills.
  • Further reading and resources to build on knowledge about online education.
  • End of chapter checklists which summarizes suggestions about how to be a model online teacher.
An Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching
Developing the Model Teacher, 2nd edition
By Aaron S. Richmond, Guy A. Boysen, and Regan A. R. Gurung · 2021
Routledge
An Evidence-based Guide to College and University Teaching outlines a definition of "model teaching" based on research evidence and accepted best practices in high education.

Teachers at all levels of skill and experience can benefit from clear, objective guidelines for defining and measuring quality teaching. To fulfil this need, this book outlines six fundamental areas of teaching competency—model teaching characteristics—and provides detailed definitions of each characteristic. The authors define these essential characteristics as training, course content, the assessment process, instructional methods, syllabus construction, and the use of student evaluations. This guide outlines through research and supplemental evidence how each characteristic can be used toward tenure, promotion, teaching portfolios, and general professional development. Additional features include a self-assessment tool that corresponds to the model teaching characteristics, case studies illustrating common teaching problems, and lists of "must reads" about college teaching.

An Evidence-based Guide to College and University Teaching describes how college faculty from all disciplines and at all levels of their career – from graduate students to late-career faculty – can use the model teaching characteristics to evaluate, guide, and improve their teaching. The book is additionally useful for teachers, trainers, and administrators responsible for promoting excellence in college teaching.
Thriving in Academia
Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution
By Pamela I. Ansburg, Mark E. Basham, and Regan A. R. Gurung · 2021
American Psychological Association
Veteran professors synthesize their combined 60+ years of expertise at primarily undergraduate, teaching-focused universities into easy‑to‑follow advice for graduate students and current faculty seeking to build thriving careers at similar institutions.

Writing in a friendly tone that includes their personal reflections, the authors guide readers through the entire career trajectory: finding and applying for positions, developing essential knowledge and skills over the course of one’s career, seeking tenure and promotions, and continuing to thrive in the mid- to late-career stages while preparing for retirement.

The authors offer detailed insights for becoming a successful academic who can meet all the expectations of a teaching-focused institution. They explain how to develop core teaching competencies; choose advising philosophies for mentoring individual students, groups, and clubs; perform high-quality faculty service; and achieve scholarly, creative, and research goals—all while managing a high teaching load.

Strategies for obtaining scarce yet crucial resources—time, money, and mentors—are also provided.
Preparing for College and University Teaching
Competencies for Graduate and Professional Students
By Joanna Gilmore and Molly Hatcher · 2021
Stylus
This book is a guide for designing professional development programs for graduate students. The teaching competencies framework presented here can serve as the intended curriculum for such programs. The book will also be an excellent resource for evaluating programs, and will be an excellent resource for academics who study graduate students.

This book presents the work of the Graduate Teaching Competencies Consortium to identify, organize, and clarify the competencies that graduate students need to teach effectively when they join the professoriate. To achieve this goal, the Consortium developed a framework of 10 teaching competencies organized around three overarching questions:
  • What do graduate students need to achieve by the end of their graduate education to be successful teacher-scholars?
  • What do graduate students need to understand about higher education to have successful careers as educators?
  • What do graduate students need to do to be successful teachers during their graduate student careers?
Although much work has been done to identify the competencies of effective teachers in higher education, only a small portion of this work has been conducted with graduate student instructors. This is an important area of research given that graduate students are critical in the higher education academic pipeline. Nationally, graduate students teach between 25% and 50% of courses offered at the undergraduate level. Graduate student teaching is also critical because during early teaching experiences teachers establish a teaching style and set of teaching skills, which will endure as graduate students enter the professoriate.

It is important to develop a teaching competency framework that is specific to graduate student instructors as they often have unique needs and roles as teachers. For example, graduate student instructors are in the unique position of becoming experts in their field concurrent with learning to teach. Moreover, as many professional development programs for graduate student instructors evolve based upon factors such as available resources and perceived needs of graduate students, this framework will be a useful aid for thoughtfully designing strategic, evidence-based, comprehensive professional development opportunities and programs.
Beyond the Lecture
Interacting with Students and Shaping the Classroom Dynamic
By Katie A. L. McAllister · 2021
Rowman & Littlefield
Higher education is undergoing a reinvention. More and more instruction is moving beyond the traditional lecture to include active learning and engagement supported by technology. Without training, many instructors simply continue to lecture, but those wishing to develop their pedagogy can take action and move beyond passive methods of delivering content.

A detailed discussion of academic research empowers instructors to examine, develop, and justify their approach to teaching. The focus across topics rests on effective interactions and the overall classroom dynamic, grounded in psychology, the science of learning, and perspectives on critical thinking.

Each chapter includes self-assessments and “things to try” in order to understand current practice and develop the ability to promote student engagement, foster critical thinking, manage challenging behaviors, and positively shape the classroom dynamic.
Designing Courses with Digital Technologies
Insights and Examples from Higher Education
By Stefan Hrastinski · 2021
Routledge
Designing Courses with Digital Technologies offers guidance for higher education instructors integrating digital technologies into their teaching, assessment and overall support of students. Written by and for instructors from a variety of disciplines, this book presents evaluations that the contributors have implemented in real-life courses, spanning blended and distance learning, flipped classrooms, collaborative technologies, video-supported learning and beyond. Chapter authors contextualize their approaches beyond simple how-tos, exploring both the research foundations and professional experiences that have informed their use of digital tools while reflecting on their successes, challenges and ideas for future development.
What Inclusive Instructors Do
Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching
By Tracie Marcella Addy, Derek Dube, Khadijah A. Mitchell, and Mallory E. SoRelle · 2021
Stylus
This book uniquely offers the distilled wisdom of scores of instructors across ranks, disciplines and institution types, whose contributions are organized into a thematic framework that progressively introduces the reader to the key dispositions, principles and practices for creating the inclusive classroom environments (in person and online) that will help their students succeed.

The authors asked the hundreds of instructors whom they surveyed as part of a national study to define what inclusive teaching meant to them and what inclusive teaching approaches they implemented in their courses.

The instructors’ voices ring loudly as the authors draw on their responses, building on their experiences and expertise to frame the conversation about what inclusive teachers do. The authors in addition describe their own insights and practices, integrating and discussing current literature relevant to inclusive teaching to ensure a research-supported approach.

Inclusive teaching is no longer an option but a vital teaching competency as our classrooms fill with racially diverse, first generation, and low income and working class students who need a sense of belonging and recognition to thrive and contribute to the construction of knowledge.

The book unfolds as an informal journey that allows the reader to see into other teachers’ practices. With questions for reflection embedded throughout the book, the authors provide the reader with an inviting and thoughtful guide to develop their own inclusive teaching practices.
Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership
By Alise de Bie, Elizabeth Marquis, Alison Cook-Sather, and Leslie Luqueño · 2021
Stylus
Faculty and staff in higher education are looking for ways to address the deep inequity and systemic racism that pervade our colleges and universities. Pedagogical partnership can be a powerful tool to enhance equity, inclusion, and justice in our classrooms and curricula. These partnerships create opportunities for students from underrepresented and equity-seeking groups to collaborate with faculty and staff to revise and reinvent pedagogies, assessments, and course designs, positioning equity and justice as core educational aims. When students have a seat at the table, previously unheard voices are amplified, and diversity and difference introduce essential perspectives that are too often overlooked.

In particular, the book contributes to the literature on pedagogical partnership and equity in education by integrating theory, synthesizing research, and providing concrete examples of the ways partnership can contribute to more equitable educational systems. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that partnership can only realize its full potential to redress harms and promote equity and justice when thoughtfully enacted. This book is a resource that will inspire and challenge a wide variety of higher education faculty and staff and contribute to advancing both practice and research on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnerships.

Presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the various epistemological, affective, and ontological harms that face students from equity-seeking groups in postsecondary education, Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership applies this conceptual framework to current literature in partnerships, highlighting the promise of partnership as the way to redress these harms.

The authors ground both the conceptual framework and the literature review by offering two case studies of pedagogical partnership in practice. They then explore the complexities raised by their framework, including the conditions under which partnerships themselves may risk reproducing epistemic, affective, or ontological harms. Applying the framework in this way allows them to propose strategies that make it more likely for these mediations to be successful.

Finally, the authors focus on the future of pedagogical partnership and share their perspectives on new directions for inquiry and practice. After summarizing the overarching themes developed throughout the book, the authors leave the reader with a set of questions and recommendations for further inquiry and discussion.
Motivational Immediacy
Fostering Engagement in Adult Learners
By Jonathan E. Taylor · 2021
Stylus
This book provides a fresh look at the question of learner motivation and engagement, beginning with an investigation of potential motivations not to learn, the better to help instructors find more successful ways to engage learners in any given situation. After examining various kinds of resistance to learning, the book goes on to describe effective ways of overcoming resistance and engaging learners.

Grounded in the literature of many fields, such as Adult Education, Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, and Communication (as well as the author’s own decades of experience), the book connects the concepts surrounding learning resistance directly to engagement and human motivation, drawing these ideas together to make the case for practicing motivational immediacy in all learning spaces. The second section of the book focuses on the various tools effective teachers might use to mitigate learner resistance and foster authentic and lasting engagement. The author devotes a chapter to using curriculum and Instructional Systems Design (ISD) processes to effectively foster engaged learning in different learning spaces and contexts. Two chapters are devoted to applying the theory and methods to specific domains: online learning environments, and face-to-face classrooms with both undergraduate and graduate students. The last section includes a chapter that provides a potential method to measure effectual learning in the classroom, and one that addresses the ethical issues sometimes said to exist in efforts to mitigate learner resistance and foster engagement in its place. The final chapter draws the book to a close by presenting a fluid whole that will greatly improve understanding of the ideas as well as the methods best used to reduce learning resistance, increase learner engagement, and facilitate motivational immediacy and effectual learning.
Infusing Critical Thinking into Your Course
A Concrete, Practical Approach
By Linda B. Nilson · 2021
Stylus
Critical thinking—every scholar in the literature has defined it, but there is no clearly agreed upon definition. No wonder polls and surveys reveal that few college-level faculty can define critical thinking or know how to teach it. Still, critical thinking keeps appearing in accreditation standards and surveys of the skills employers seek in college graduates.

The good news is that we do know that critical thinking can be taught. But the concept cries out for the simplification, translation into discipline-relevant course outcomes, tangible teaching strategies, and concrete assessment techniques that this book will provide.

Like a course or a workshop, this book proposes learning outcomes for the reader—promises of what the reader will be able to do after reading it. These include:
  • explain what critical thinking is in simple terms;
  • convincingly explain to students why it is important for them to learn critical thinking, and, if they tune out, what they stand to lose;
  • overcome the challenges that teaching critical thinking presents;
  • identify the type of course content to which critical thinking can be applied and, therefore, that readers can use to teach critical thinking;
  • integrate critical thinking into the design of a new or existing course in any discipline;
  • write assessable critical thinking learning outcomes that are compatible with and make sense in any discipline;
  • select and adapt activities and assignments that will give students no- or low-stakes practice with feedback in critical thinking using a variety of questions, tasks, and teaching methods.
College Success for Students on the Autism Spectrum
A Neurodiversity Perspective
By S. Jay Kuder, Amy Accardo, and John Woodruff · 2021
Stylus
Helping both college faculty and student affairs staff enlarge their understanding of the experiences of students on the autism spectrum, this book provides guidance on putting supports in place to increase college success.

Uniquely, the authors bring the perspective of neurodiversity to this work. Many individuals on the autism spectrum have been stigmatized by the diagnosis and experience autism as a negative label that brings with it marginalization and barriers through an emphasis on deficits. Autistic self-advocates within the neurodiversity movement are leading the charge to rethinking autism as neurodiversity, and to celebrating autism as central to identity. Neurodiversity is not a theory or a way of being, it is a fact, and neurological diversity should be valued and respected along with any other human variation such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

The book provides the practical guidance needed to help neurodivergent students succeed, with chapters that address a variety of key issues from the transition to college to career readiness after graduation. The authors address support services, faculty and staff roles, and enhancing academic success. They also cover navigating the social demands of college life, working with families, and mental health. The final chapter brings it all together, describing the elements of a comprehensive program to help this student population succeed.

Difficulties with social interaction and communication are one of the defining characteristics of autism and often persist into adulthood. It can be assumed that difficulties with social interaction and communication may also impact college success, both socially and academically. But the answer for these students is not necessarily to try to "fix" these issues, since the fact that these students have been admitted to a degree-granting program shows that they can be successful students. Instead, there should be an emphasis on helping faculty, staff, and students understand the diversity of human behavior while helping autistic students achieve college success through a support system and by providing accommodations and services when needed.
Becoming a White Antiracist
A Practical Guide for Educators, Leaders, and Activists
By Stephen D. Brookfield and Mary E. Hess · 2021
Stylus
As this book was being written, the United States exploded in outrage against the murder by police of people of color across the country. Corporations, branches of state and local government, and educational institutions all pledged to work for racial justice and the Black Lives Matters movement moved into the mainstream as people from multiple racial and class identities pledged their support to its message. Diversity initiatives abounded, mission statements everywhere were changed to incorporate references to racial justice, and the rampant anti-blackness endemic to US culture was brought strikingly to the surface. Everywhere, it seemed, white people were looking to learn about race. “What do we do?” “How can we help?” These were the cries the authors heard most frequently from those whites whose consciousness of racism was being raised.

This book is their answer to those cries. It’s grounded in the idea that white people need to start with themselves, with understanding that they have a white racial identity. Once you’ve learned about what it means to be white in a white supremacist world, the answer of "what can I do" becomes clear. Sometimes you work in multiracial alliances, but more often you work with white colleagues and friends. In this book the authors explore what it means for whites to move from becoming aware of the extent of their unwitting collusion in racism, towards developing a committed antiracist white identity. They create a road map, or series of paths, that people can consider traveling as they work to develop a positive white identity centered around enacting antiracism.

The book will be useful to anyone trying to create conversations around race, teach about white supremacy, arrange staff and development workshops on racism, and help colleagues explore how to create an antiracist culture or environment. This work happens in schools, colleges and universities, and we suspect many readers will be located in K-12 and higher education. But helping people develop an antiracist identity is a project that occurs in corporations, congregations, community groups, health care, state and local government, arts organizations, and the military as well. Essentially, if you have an interest in helping the whites you interact with become antiracist, then this book is written very specifically for you.
Advancing Assessment for Student Success
Supporting Learning by Creating Connections Across Assessment, Teaching, Curriculum, and Cocurriculum in Collaboration With Our Colleagues and Our Students
By Amy Driscoll, Swarup Wood, Dan Shapiro, and Nelson Graff · 2021
Stylus
This book is about student success and how to support and improve it. It takes as its point of departure that we⁠—as faculty, assessment directors, student affairs professionals, and staff⁠—reflect together in a purposeful and informed way about how our teaching, curricula, the co-curriculum, and assessment work in concert to support and improve student learning and success. It also requires that we do so in collaboration with our colleagues and our students for the rich insights that we gain from them.

Conversational in style, this book offers a wide variety of illustrations of how your peers are putting assessment into practice in ways that are meaningful to them and their institutions, and that lead to improved student learning. The authors provide rich guidance for activities ranging from everyday classroom teaching and assessment to using assessment to improve programs and entire institutions.

The authors envisage individual faculty at four-year institutions and community colleges as their main audience, whether those faculty are focused on their own classes or support their colleagues through leadership roles in assessment. If you plan to remain focused on your own courses and students, you will find that those sections of this book will help you better understand why and how assessment leaders do what they do, which in turn will make your participation in assessment more engaging and increase your expertise in facilitating student learning. Because the authors also aim to strengthen connections between the curriculum and co-curriculum and include examples of co-curricular assessment, student affairs professionals and staff interested in doing the same will also find ideas in this book relevant to their work.

Opening with a chapter on equity in assessment practice, so critical to learning from and benefitting our diverse students, the authors guide you through the development and use of learning outcomes, the design of assignments with attention to clear prompts and rubrics, and the achievement of alignment and coherence in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment to better support student engagement, achievement and success. The chapter on using student evidence for improvement offers support, resources, and recommendations for doing so, and demonstrates exciting uses of student wisdom.

The book concludes by emphasizing the importance of reflection in assessment practices⁠—offering powerful examples and strategies for professional development⁠—and by describing appropriate, creative, and effective approaches for communicating assessment information with attention to purpose and audience.
Ending Sexual Violence in College
A Community-Focused Approach
By Joanne H. Gavin, James Campbell Quick, and David J. Gavin · 2021
Johns Hopkins University Press
In a world where one in five women on campus experience some form of sexual assault, what would it take to create a campus culture that was free of violence against women? From a public health perspective, sexual assault is an epidemic on campuses, but why? What is it about a campus community culture that permits or encourages this, at a time when a majority of students are now female? In this practical guide for colleges and universities, Joanne H. Gavin, James Campbell Quick, and David J. Gavin lay out a community-based model that is designed to eliminate sexual misconduct, spot it before it happens, punish its perpetrators, support its victims/survivors, and end this epidemic.

Ending Sexual Violence in College is a prescriptive guide for creating a campus culture that is intolerant of sexual misconduct regardless of who is involved or the context in which it happens. A culture of intolerance, the authors argue, does not consider the role or status of either the perpetrator or victim/survivor. Rather, this culture protects all members. Using a public health model with an emphasis on prevention to create this cultural change, the book utilizes psychological and organizational research to understand the challenges of making these changes while enhancing the odds of permanent cultural change for the better.

Designed to spur community-wide conversations on how we can make our campuses safe from sexual violence, this book's preventive approach allows communities to self-monitor. The authors include case studies of institutions that have not been proactive in putting programs in place to protect students, as well as examples of institutions that are effectively addressing these problems. Aimed at college administrators and Title IX coordinators who are responsible for leading campuses that are safe for everyone, Ending Sexual Violence in College also enables those who work or live on a college campus to take an active role in making the campus safer.
Teaching Change
How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection
By José Antonio Bowen · 2021
Johns Hopkins University Press
Learning something new—particularly something that might change your mind—is much more difficult than most teachers think. Because people think with their emotions and are influenced by their communities and social groups, humans tend to ignore new information unless it fits their existing worldview. Thus facts alone, even if discussed in detail, typically fail to open minds and create change. In a world in need of graduates who can adapt to new information and situations, we need to renew our educational commitment to producing flexible and independent thinkers.

In Teaching Change, José Antonio Bowen argues that education needs to be redesigned to take into account how human thinking, behaviors, bias, and change really work. Drawing on new research, Bowen explores how we can create better conditions for learning that focus less on teachers and content and more on students and process. He also examines student psychology, history, assumptions, anxiety, and bias and advocates for education to focus on a new 3Rs—relationships, resilience, and reflection. Finally, he suggests explicit learning designs to foster the ability to think for yourself.

The case for a liberal (by which Bowen means liberating) education has never been stronger, but, he says, it needs to be redesigned to achieve the goal of creating lifelong learners and citizens capable of divergent and independent thinking. With an expansive and powerful argument, Teaching Change combines elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers.
Connecting in the Online Classroom
Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students
By Rebecca A. Glazier · 2021
Johns Hopkins University Press
More students than ever before are taking online classes, yet higher education is facing an online retention crisis; students are failing and dropping out of online classes at dramatically higher rates than face-to-face classes. Grounded in academic research, original surveys, and experimental studies, Connecting in the Online Classroom demonstrates how connecting with students in online classes through even simple rapport-building efforts can significantly improve retention rates and help students succeed.

Drawing on more than a dozen years of experience teaching and researching online, Rebecca Glazier provides practical, easy-to-use techniques that online instructors can implement right away to begin building rapport with their students, including
  • proactively reaching out through personalized check-in emails;
  • creating opportunities for human connection before courses even begin through a short welcome survey;
  • communicating faculty investment in students' success by providing individualized and meaningful assignment feedback;
  • hosting non-content-based discussion threads where students and faculty can get to know one other; and
  • responding to students' questions with positivity and encouragement (and occasionally also cute animal pictures).
She also presents case studies of universities that are already using these strategies, along with specific, data-driven recommendations for administrators, making the book valuable for faculty, instructional designers, support staff, and administrators alike.

The science-backed strategies that Glazier provides will enable instructors to connect with their students and help those students thrive. Speaking to the paradox of online learning, the book also explains that, although the great promise of online education is expanded access and greater equity—especially for traditionally underserved and hard-to-reach populations, like lower-income students, working parents, first-generation students, and students of color—the current gap between online and face-to-face retention means universities are falling far short of this promise.
The Online Teaching Survival Guide
Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips, 3rd edition
By Judith V. Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad · 2021
Jossey-Bass
The Online Teaching Survival Guide provides a robust overview of theory-based techniques for teaching online or technology-enhanced courses. This Third Edition is a practical resource for educators learning to navigate the online teaching sector. It presents a framework of simple, research-grounded instructional strategies that work for any online or blended course. This new edition is enhanced with hints on integrating problem-solving strategies, assessment strategies, student independence, collaboration, synchronous strategies, and building metacognitive skills. This book also reviews the latest research in cognitive processing and related learning outcomes.

New and experienced online teachers alike will appreciate this book’s exploration of essential technologies, course management techniques, social presence, community building, discussion and questioning techniques, assessment, debriefing, and more. With more and more classes being offered online, this book provides a valuable resource for taking your course to the next level.
  • Understand the technology used in online teaching and discover how you can make the most of advanced features in the tech you use
  • Learn specialized pedagogical tips and practices that will make the shift to online teaching smoother for you and your students
  • Examine new research on cognition and learning, and see how you can apply these research findings your day-to-day
  • Adopt a clear framework of instructional strategies that will work in any online or blended setting
  • Learn how to make the most of your synchronous online class meetings using flipped model techniques integrated with asynchronous conversation
Recently, schools across the globe have experienced a shift to online courses and teaching. The theories and techniques of synchronous virtual online teaching are vastly different from traditional educational pedagogy. You can overcome the learning curve with this theory-based, hands-on guide.
Keeping Us Engaged
Student Perspectives (and Research-Based Strategies) on What Works and Why
By Christine Harrington · 2021
Stylus
This book offers faculty practical strategies to engage students that are research-grounded and endorsed by students themselves. Through student stories, a signature feature of this book, readers will discover why professor actions result in changed attitudes, stronger connections to others and the course material, and increased learning.

Structured to cover the key moments and opportunities to increase student engagement, Christine Harrington covers the all-important first day of class where first impressions can determine students’ attitudes for the duration of the course, through to insights for rethinking assignments and enlivening teaching strategies, to ways of providing feedback that build students’ confidence and spur them to greater immersion in their studies, providing the underlying rationale for the strategies she presents. The student narratives not only validate these practices, offering their perspectives as learners, but constitute a trove of ideas and practices that readers will be inspired to adapt for their particular needs.

Conscious of the changing demographics of today’s undergraduate and graduate students – racially more diverse, older, and many employed – Harrington highlights the need to engage all students and shares numerous strategies on how to do so. While many of the ideas presented were used by faculty teaching face to face classes, a number were developed by faculty teaching online, and the majority can be adapted to virtually any teaching environment.

Based on student-centered active learning principles, structured to allow readers to quickly identify practices that they may need in particular instances or to infuse in a course as a whole, and presented without jargon, this book is a springboard for all faculty looking for ideas that will engage their students at any level and in any course.
Skim, Dive, Surface
Teaching Digital Reading
By Jenae Cohn · 2021
West Virginia University Press
Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.
Minding Bodies
How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning
By Susan Hrach · 2021
West Virginia University Press
Starting from new research on the body—aptly summarized as “sitting is the new smoking”—Minding Bodies aims to help instructors improve their students’ knowledge and skills through physical movement, attention to the spatial environment, and sensitivity to humans as more than “brains on sticks.” It shifts the focus of adult learning from an exclusively mental effort toward an embodied, sensory-rich experience, offering new strategies to maximize the effectiveness of time spent learning together on campus as well as remotely.

Minding Bodies draws from a wide range of body/mind research in cognitive psychology, kinesiology, and phenomenology to bring a holistic perspective to teaching and learning. The embodied learning approaches described by Susan Hrach are inclusive, low-tech, low-cost strategies that deepen the development of disciplinary knowledge and skills. Campus change-makers will also find recommendations for supporting a transformational mission through an attention to students’ embodied learning experiences.
Engaging Ideas
The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 3rd edition
By John C. Bean and Dan Melzer · 2021
Jossey-Bass
The newly revised third edition of Engaging Ideas delivers a step-by-step guide for designing writing assignments and critical thinking activities that engage students with important subject-matter questions. This new edition of the celebrated book uses leading and current research and theory to help you link active learning pedagogy to your courses' subject matter. You'll learn how to:
  • Design formal and informal writing assignments that guide students toward thinking like experts in your discipline
  • Use time-saving strategies for coaching the writing process and handling the paper load including alternatives to traditional grading such as portfolio assessment and contract grading
  • Help students use self-assessment and peer response to improve their work
  • Develop better ways than the traditional research paper to teach undergraduate reading and research
  • Integrate social media, multimodal genres, and digital technology into the classroom to promote active learning
This book demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with other critical thinking activities such as inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in the questions your course investigates, more apt to study purposefully, and more likely to submit high-quality work. Perfect for higher education faculty and curriculum designers across all disciplines, Engaging Ideas will also earn a place in the libraries of graduate students in higher education.
Online Teaching at Its Best
Merging Instructional Design with Teaching and Learning Research, 2nd edition
By Linda B. Nilson and Ludwika A. Goodson · 2021
Jossey-Bass
This book addresses course design, teaching, and student motivation across the continuum of online teaching modes—remote, hybrid, hyflex, and fully online—integrating these with pedagogical and cognitive science, and grounding its recommendations in the latest research. The book will help you design or redesign your courses to ensure strong course alignment and effective student learning in any of these teaching modes. Its emphasis on evidence-based practices makes this one of the most scholarly books of its kind on the market today.

This new edition features significant new content including more active learning formats for small groups across the online teaching continuum, strategies and tools for scripting and recording effective micro-lectures, ways to integrate quiz items within micro-lectures, more conferencing software and techniques to add interactivity, and a guide for rapid transition from face-to-face to online teaching. You’ll also find updated examples, references, and quotes to reflect more evolved technology.
  • Adopt new pedagogical techniques designed specifically for remote, hybrid, hyflex, and fully online learning environments
  • Ensure strong course alignment and effective student learning for all these modes of instruction
  • Increase student retention, build necessary support structures, and train faculty more effectively
  • Integrate research-based course design and cognitive psychology into graduate or undergraduate programs
Distance is no barrier to a great education. Online Teaching at Its Best provides practical, real-world advice grounded in educational and psychological science to help online instructors, instructional designers, and administrators deliver an exceptional learning experience even under emergency conditions.
Small Teaching
Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, 2nd edition
By James M. Lang · 2021
Jossey-Bass
Research into how we learn can help facilitate better student learning—if we know how to apply it. Small Teaching fills the gap in higher education literature between the primary research in cognitive theory and the classroom environment. In this book, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of small but powerful changes that make a big difference―many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These are simple interventions that can be integrated into pre-existing techniques, along with clear descriptions of how to do so. Inside, you’ll find brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or student communication. These small tweaks will bring your classroom into alignment with the latest evidence in cognitive research.

Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive research that has implications for classroom teaching, explains the rationale for offering it within a specific time period in a typical class, and then provides concrete examples of how this intervention has been used or could be used by faculty in a variety of disciplines. The second edition features revised and updated content including a newly authored preface, new examples and techniques, updated research, and updated resources.
  • How can you make small tweaks to your teaching to bring the latest cognitive science into the classroom?
  • How can you help students become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
  • How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
  • How can you build community in the classroom?
Higher education faculty and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and teacher trainers, will love the easy-to-implement, evidence-based techniques in Small Teaching.
Super Courses
The Future of Teaching and Learning
By Ken Bain · 2021
Princeton University Press
Decades of research have produced profound insights into how student learning and motivation can be unleashed—and it’s not through technology or even the best of lectures. In Super Courses, education expert and bestselling author Ken Bain tells the fascinating story of enterprising college, graduate school, and high school teachers who are using evidence-based approaches to spark deeper levels of learning, critical thinking, and creativity—whether teaching online, in class, or in the field.

Visiting schools across the United States as well as in China and Singapore, Bain, working with his longtime collaborator, Marsha Marshall Bain, uncovers super courses throughout the humanities and sciences. At the University of Virginia, undergrads contemplate the big questions that drove Tolstoy—by working with juveniles at a maximum-security correctional facility. Harvard physics students learn about the universe not through lectures but from their peers in a class where even reading is a social event. And students at a Dallas high school use dance to develop growth mindsets—and many of them go on to top colleges, including Juilliard. Bain defines these as super courses because they all use powerful researched-based elements to build a “natural critical learning environment” that fosters intrinsic motivation, self-directed learning, and self-reflective reasoning. Complete with sample syllabi, the book shows teachers how they can build their own super courses.

The story of a hugely important breakthrough in education, Super Courses reveals how these classes can help students reach their full potential, equip them to lead happy and productive lives, and meet the world’s complex challenges.
Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning
Building Expressways to Success
By Andratesha Fritzgerald · 2020
CAST, Inc.
In Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success, Andratesha Fritzgerald reveals Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as an effective framework to teach Black and Brown students. Drawing vivid portraits of classroom instruction, Fritzgerald shows how teachers open new roads of communication, engagement, and skill-building for students who feel honored and loved.
Facilitating the Integration of Learning
Five Research-Based Practices to Help College Students Connect Learning Across Disciplines and Lived Experience
By James P. Barber · 2020
Stylus
Students’ ability to integrate learning across contexts is a critical outcome for higher education. Often the most powerful learning experiences that students report from their college years are those that prompt integration of learning, yet it remains an outcome that few educators explicitly work towards or specify as a course objective.

Given that students will be more successful in college (and in life) if they can integrate their learning, James Barber offers a guide for college educators on how to promote students’ integration of learning, and help them connect knowledge and insights across contexts, whether in-class or out-of-class, in co-curricular activities, or across courses and disciplinary boundaries.

This book is addressed to a wide range of educators engaged with college student learning, from faculty to student affairs administrators, athletic coaches, internship supervisors, or anyone concerned with student development.

The opening chapters lay the foundation for the book, defining what integration of learning is, how to promote it and students’ capacities for reflection; and introduce the author’s research-based Integration of Learning (IOL) model

The second section of the book provides practical, real-world strategies for facilitating integration of learning that college educators can use right away in multiple learning contexts. James Barber describes practices that readers can integrate as appropriate in their classes or activities, under chapters respectively devoted to Mentoring, Writing as Praxis, Juxtaposition, Hands-On Experiences, and Diversity and Identity.

The author concludes by outlining how to apply IOL to a multiplicity of settings, such as a major, a single course, programming for a student organization, or other co-curricular experience; as well as offering guidance on assessing and documenting students’ mastery of this outcome.
The Power of Partnership
Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education
By Lucy Mercer-Mapstone and Sophia Abbot · 2020
Center for Engaged Learning
The Power of Partnership celebrates the nuance and depth of student-faculty partnerships in higher education and illustrates the many ways that partnership—the equitable collaboration among students, staff, and faculty in support of teaching and learning—has the potential to transform lives and institutions.

The book aims to break the mold of traditional and power-laden academic writing by showcasing creative genres such as reflection, poetry, dialogue, illustration, and essay. The collection has invited chapters from renowned scholars in the field alongside new student and staff voices, and it reflects and embodies a wide range of student-staff partnership perspectives from different roles, identities, cultures, countries, and institutions.
Active Learning Online
Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive
By Stephen M. Kosslyn · 2020
Alinea Learning
The massive disruption of the covid pandemic offers limitless possibilities to improve education, and Stephen M. Kosslyn provides an excellent guide to show us how.

Active Learning Online clearly explains the science behind the benefits of active learning theory and provides concrete examples of how to re-design learning activities to stimulate, engage, and motivate students in online environments.

We’ve been reading the research for decades about how lectures and rote learning are not as effective as active engagement. We know we can lose children academically when they aren’t interested in a particular subject or area of study. In this easy to read book, Kosslyn describes the five key principles to make whatever you are teaching better and more meaningful for your learners.
Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education
A Research-Based Pedagogical Guide for Faculty
By Kathryn C. Oleson · 2020
Stylus
This powerful, practical resource helps faculty create an inclusive dynamic in their classrooms, so that all students are set up to succeed. Grounded in research and theory (including educational psychology, scholarship of teaching and learning, intergroup dialogue, and social justice theory), this book provides practical solutions to help faculty create an inclusive learning environment in which all students can thrive.

Each chapter focuses on palpable ideas and adaptive strategies to use right away when teaching.
  • The first chapter consider professors’ intersecting personal and social identities and their expectations for themselves and their students.
  • Chapter 2 considers students’ backgrounds, including class, race, disability, and gender, and focuses on what students bring to the classroom, exploring their basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and belonging; their approaches to learning; and their self-doubts and uncertainties.
  • Chapter 3 draws on universally-designed learning in combination with educational design rooted in social justice and multiculturalism to describe ways to design spaces in which students flourish academically.
  • Chapter 4 primarily focuses on preparation for having difficult conversations in the classroom, considering how instructors can create a shared understanding between themselves and their students.
  • Chapter 5 focuses on in-the-moment strategies to both create and manage discomfort about sensitive and controversial topics while supporting students of various social identities (such as gender, race, disability).
  • In the closing chapter, the author integrates all the elements in the preceding chapters, and also presents more general college-wide programs to help faculty develop and improve their teaching.
Designing the Online Learning Experience
Evidence-Based Principles and Strategies
By Simone C. O. Conceição and Les Howles · 2020
Stylus
This book provides instructors with a holistic way of thinking about learners, learning, and online course design. The distinctive strategies derived from an integrated framework for designing the online learning experience help create an experience that is more personalized, engaging, and meaningful for online learners.

The focus of this book is on the learners and the design of their online learning experiences. The authors refer to learning design instead of instructional design – which focuses on instruction and places the instructor at the center stage of the process. Therefore, the focus is on approaching a learner’s online course experience as a journey consisting of a combination of learning interactions with content, instructor, and other learners.

In most online courses, instructors and learners are separated in time and space and depend on technology to facilitate interactions that often lack a strong personal dimension. As online learning continues to proliferate and mature, the emphasis on simply making content available to students online is no longer acceptable. Creating online courses now requires a new way of thinking that incorporates new design ideas and approaches from a variety of fields; it also requires a new set of learning design skills for instructors and course designers.

Organized into eight chapters, this volume focuses on enhancing online learning experiences for each of the major aspects of an online course, providing evidence-based principles and strategies to promote learner engagement and deep learning. The concluding chapter provides an example illustrating a real-world application of the principles and strategies covered in the book, using Design Thinking to create learning experiences.

This book provides strategies for approaching the learning experience from an integrative perspective for both experienced online instructors and those new to online course design. These strategies are based on evidence-based learning design principles and encourage the reader to adopt an empathic mindset focused on the experience of the learner.
Advancing Online Teaching
Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments
By Kevin Kelly · 2020
Stylus
The goal of teaching online is fundamentally the same as teaching face-to-face: facilitating the learning of all students to the greatest extent possible. This book differs from other books on online teaching in that, in the process of offering guidance on course design and planning, developing outcomes and appropriate engaging activities, managing the workload and assessment, the authors pay explicit attention throughout to the distinct and diverse needs of students and offer effective strategies to accommodate them in a comprehensive and inclusive way by using the principles of Universal Design for Learning.

By following those principles from the outset when planning a course, all students will benefit, and most particularly those whom the research shows have the greatest achievement gaps when taking online courses⁠—males, first generation and low income students, those from underrepresented minority groups, the academically underprepared, students with disabilities, and those with limited online access or lacking readiness for online learning.

Beyond good planning and design, Kelly and Zakrajsek offer ideas for creating inclusive course environments and activities, such as using culturally appropriate content and making it accessible in multiple formats. They also share methods to foster faculty-learner interaction and increase personal connections with students, and among students, through group activities or learning communities, which are so critical to motivation and success.

Faculty new to online teaching as well as more experienced readers will find a wealth of practical guidance on developing and honing both fully online and blended courses and, as importantly, a wealth of proven ideas to help the new generation of students with diverse needs to succeed.
99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos
A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes
By Karen Costa · 2020
Stylus
The research is clear: online learning works best when faculty build regular, positive, and interactive relationships with students. A strategy that helps forge such a relationship is the use of videos. Student satisfaction and course engagement levels also increase with the use of instructor-generated videos – the subject of this book.

Beginning by outlining the different types of videos you can create, and what the research says about their effectiveness, Karen Costa explains how they can be designed to reinforce learning, to align with and promote course outcomes, and to save you time across your courses. She then describes how to create successful videos with commonly available technologies such as your smartphone, and without a major investment of time, demonstrating the simple steps she took to develop her bank of videos and build her confidence to deliver short, straightforward learning aids that are effective and personal.

Embedded QR codes in the text enable you to view sample videos and screencasts that bring the book’s advice to life as you read.

If you’ve been wanting to include videos in your teaching but haven’t found the time or confidence, this book will help you to develop a simple and sustainable video development process, supporting both your success and the success of your students.
Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education
By Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
A quiet revolution is sweeping across US colleges and universities. As schools rethink how students learn - both inside and outside the classroom - technology is changing not only what should be taught but how best to teach it. From active learning and inclusive pedagogy to online and hybrid courses, traditional institutions are leveraging their fundamental strengths while challenging long-standing assumptions about how teaching and learning happen.

At this intersection of learning, technology, design, and organizational change lies the foundation of a new academic discipline of digital learning. Coalescing around this new field of study is a common critical language, along with a set of theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, and shared challenges and goals. In Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney explore the context of this new discipline, show how it exists within a larger body of scholarship, and give examples of how this scholarship is being used on campuses.

What Kim and Maloney demonstrate in this foundational text is an understanding that change is a complex dynamic between what happens in the classroom and the larger institutional structures and traditions at play. Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case not only for this turn to learning but also for creating new pathways for nonfaculty learning careers, understanding the limits of professional organizations and social media, and the need to establish this new interdisciplinary field of learning innovation.
Food Insecurity on Campus
Action and Intervention
By Katharine M. Broton and Clare L. Cady · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
As the price of college continues to rise and the incomes of most Americans stagnate, too many college students are going hungry. According to researchers, approximately half of all undergraduates are food insecure. Food Insecurity on Campus—the first book to describe the problem—meets higher education's growing demand to tackle the pressing question "How can we end student hunger?"

Essays by a diverse set of authors, each working to address food insecurity in higher education, describe unique approaches to the topic. They also offer insights into the most promising strategies to combat student hunger, including
  • utilizing research to raise awareness and enact change;
  • creating campus pantries, emergency aid programs, and meal voucher initiatives to meet immediate needs;
  • leveraging public benefits and nonprofit partnerships to provide additional resources;
  • changing higher education systems and college cultures to better serve students; and
  • drawing on student activism and administrative clout to influence federal, state, and local policies.
Arguing that practice and policy are improved when informed by research, Food Insecurity on Campus combines the power of data with detailed storytelling to illustrate current conditions.
Learning Online
The Student Experience
By George Veletsianos · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
Online learning is ubiquitous for millions of students worldwide, yet our understanding of student experiences in online learning settings is limited. The geographic distance that separates faculty from students in an online environment is its signature feature, but it is also one that risks widening the gulf between teachers and learners. In Learning Online, George Veletsianos argues that in order to critique, understand, and improve online learning, we must examine it through the lens of student experience.

Approaching the topic with stories that elicit empathy, compassion, and care, Veletsianos relays the diverse day-to-day experiences of online learners. Each in-depth chapter follows a single learner's experience while focusing on an important or noteworthy aspect of online learning, tackling everything from demographics, attrition, motivation, and loneliness to cheating, openness, flexibility, social media, and digital divides. Veletsianos also draws on these case studies to offer recommendations for the future and lessons learned.

The elusive nature of online learners' experiences, the book reveals, is a problem because it prevents us from doing better: from designing more effective online courses, from making evidence-informed decisions about online education, and from coming to our work with the full sense of empathy that our students deserve. Writing in an evocative, accessible, and concise manner, Veletsianos concretely demonstrates why it is so important to pay closer attention to the stories of students—who may have instructive and insightful ideas about the future of education.
Grading the College
A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning
By Scott M. Gelber · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
In Grading the College, Scott M. Gelber offers a comprehensive history of evaluating teaching and learning in higher education. He complicates the conventional narrative that portrays evaluation as a newfangled assault on the integrity of higher education while acknowledging that there are many compelling reasons to oppose those practices. The evaluation of teaching and learning, Gelber argues, presented genuine dilemmas that have attracted the attention of faculty members and academic leaders since the 1920s. Especially during the peak era of faculty authority that followed the end of the Second World War, significant numbers of professors and administrators believed that evaluation might improve institutional performance, reduce the bias inherent in traditional methods of supervision, strengthen communication with laypersons, and encourage a more deliberate focus on the distinctive goals of college.

Gelber reveals the extent to which professors and academic interest groups participated in the development of our most common evaluation instruments, including student course questionnaires, achievement tests, surveys, rubrics, rankings, and accreditation self-studies. Although these efforts may seem distant from the present era of shortsighted scrutiny and ill-conceived comparisons, Gelber demonstrates that the evaluation of college teaching and learning has long consisted of a set of intellectually sophisticated questions that have engaged, and could continue to engage, faculty members and their advocates. By providing a deeper understanding of how evaluation operated before the dawn of high-stakes accountability, Grading the College seeks to promote productive conversations about current attempts to define and measure the purposes of American higher education.
Cultivating Inquiry-Driven Learners
The Purpose of a College Education for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edition
By Clifton Conrad and Laura Dunek · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
How can colleges develop learners who pursue innovative ideas that enable them to flourish and contribute in a rapidly changing world?

Two decades into the twenty-first century, our nation's colleges and universities no longer embrace a clear and convincing definition of the purpose of a college education. Instead, most institutions have fallen prey to a default purpose in which college is essentially workforce preparation for jobs that already exist, while students are viewed as commodities instead of being educated to flourish throughout their lives. But rather than bemoan the diminishing legacy of liberal education, this new edition of Cultivating Inquiry-Driven Learners argues that the time has come to advance a pioneering purpose of college that guides the undergraduate experience from program requirements to teaching and learning.

This purpose, Clifton Conrad and Laura Dunek write, is anchored in the premise that the world in which we live is one in which change—environmental, cultural, economic, political—is a constant driving force. The authors envision a college-educated person in the twenty-first century as an "inquiry-driven learner": a person equipped with the capabilities to explore and cultivate ideas that will prepare them to successfully navigate constant change, capitalize on career opportunities, enrich their personal life, and contribute to the public good. They describe four signature capabilities that students must develop in order to innovate and adapt: core qualities of mind, critical thinking skills, expertise in divergent modes of inquiry, and the capacity to express and communicate ideas.

Guided by this trailblazing vision, Conrad and Dunek have thoroughly revised every chapter of the book to reflect current scholarship and emerging trends. In an expanded conclusion, they provide a cornucopia of ideas for replenishing undergraduate education accompanied by real-world examples of innovative programs and practices from colleges and universities across the United States. Throughout, Cultivating Inquiry-Driven Learners challenges stakeholders from across higher learning—faculty, students, staff, administrators, and policymakers—to reflect on the purpose of college, embrace innovation, and ensure that students are educated to thrive in and contribute to our constantly changing world.
The Amateur Hour
A History of College Teaching in America
By Jonathan Zimmerman · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal—scientific, objective, and dispassionate—and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction.

Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student.

But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.
Big Data on Campus
Data Analytics and Decision Making in Higher Education
By Karen L. Webber and Henry Y. Zheng · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
The continuing importance of data analytics is not lost on higher education leaders, who face a multitude of challenges, including increasing operating costs, dwindling state support, limits to tuition increases, and increased competition from the for-profit sector. To navigate these challenges, savvy leaders must leverage data to make sound decisions. In Big Data on Campus, leading data analytics experts and higher ed leaders show the role that analytics can play in the better administration of colleges and universities.

Aimed at senior administrative leaders, practitioners of institutional research, technology professionals, and graduate students in higher education, the book opens with a conceptual discussion of the roles that data analytics can play in higher education administration. Subsequent chapters address recent developments in technology, the rapid accumulation of data assets, organizational maturity in building analytical capabilities, and methodological advancements in developing predictive and prescriptive analytics. Each chapter includes a literature review of the research and application of analytics developments in their respective functional areas, a discussion of industry trends, examples of the application of data analytics in their decision process, and other related issues that readers may wish to consider in their own organizational environment to find opportunities for building robust data analytics capabilities.

Using a series of focused discussions and case studies, Big Data on Campus helps readers understand how analytics can support major organizational functions in higher education, including admission decisions, retention and enrollment management, student life and engagement, academic and career advising, student learning and assessment, and academic program planning. The final section of the book addresses major issues and human factors involved in using analytics to support decision making; the ethical, cultural, and managerial implications of its use; the role of university leaders in promoting analytics in decision making; and the need for a strong campus community to embrace the analytics revolution.
Why They Can't Write
Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities
By John Warner · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.
Student Engagement Techniques
A Handbook for College Faculty, Revised edition
By Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major · 2020
Jossey-Bass
The revised edition of Student Engagement Techniques is a much-needed guide to engaging today's information-overloaded students. The book is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers across all disciplines motivate and connect with their students.

This edition will provide a deeper understanding of what student engagement is, demonstrate new strategies for engaging students, uncover implementation strategies for engaging students in online learning environments, and provide new examples on how to implement these techniques into STEM fields.
Ungrading
Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)
By Susan D. Blum · 2020
West Virginia University Press
The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.
Radical Hope
A Teaching Manifesto
By Kevin M. Gannon · 2020
West Virginia University Press
Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in college teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practical—the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice.

Kevin Gannon asks that the contemporary university’s manifold problems be approached as opportunities for critical engagement, arguing that, when done effectively, teaching is by definition emancipatory and hopeful. Considering individual pedagogical practice, the students who are the primary audience and beneficiaries of teaching, and the institutions and systems within which teaching occurs, Radical Hope surveys the field, tackling everything from impostor syndrome to cell phones in class to allegations of a campus “free speech crisis.” Throughout, Gannon translates ideals into tangible strategies and practices (including key takeaways at the conclusion of each chapter), with the goal of reclaiming teachers’ essential role in the discourse of higher education.
Relationship-Rich Education
How Human Connections Drive Success in College
By Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert · 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions.

In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations.

Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation—and a challenge—for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.
Distracted
Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do about It
By James M. Lang · 2020
Basic Books
Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students’ ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class.

But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information.

In Distracted, Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students’ attention.

Brimming with ideas and grounded in new research, Distracted offers an innovative plan for the most important lesson of all: how to learn.
The Instruction Myth
Why Higher Education Is Hard to Change, and How to Change It
By John Tagg · 2019
Rutgers University Press
Higher education is broken, and we haven’t been able to fix it. Even in the face of great and growing dysfunction, it seems resistant to fundamental change. At this point, can anything be done to save it?

The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process. In fact, it will require universities to abandon their central operating principle, the belief that education revolves around instruction, easily measurable in course syllabi, credits, and enrollments. Acclaimed education scholar John Tagg presents a powerful case that instruction alone is worthless and that universities should instead be centered upon student learning, which is far harder to quantify and standardize. Yet, as he shows, decades of research have indicated how to best promote student learning, but few universities have systematically implemented these suggestions.

This book demonstrates why higher education must undergo radical change if it hopes to survive. More importantly, it offers specific policy suggestions for how universities can break their harmful dependence on the instruction myth. In this extensively researched book, Tagg offers a compelling diagnosis of what’s ailing American higher education and a prescription for how it might still heal itself.
Learning Analytics in Higher Education
Current Innovations, Future Potential, and Practical Applications
By Jaime Lester, Aditya Johri, and Huzefa Rangwala · 2019
Routledge
Predictive analytics and the use of analytics for systematic improvement in recruitment, retention, student support and learning design is a growing focus for many in higher education. Two reports published early in 2017 suggest that, while the prospects for the use of analytics are significant, adoption is currently modest. This book explains why. Implementation, as in all significant change, requires process redesign and the re-imagination of key roles in the college or university.
Project-Based Learning in the First Year
Beyond All Expectations
By Kristin K. Wobbe and Elisabeth A. Stoddard · 2019
Stylus
This book has two goals: First, to show the value of significant project-based work for first-year undergraduate students; and Second, to share how to introduce this work into first year programs. The authors spend the bulk of the book sharing what they have learned about this practice, including details about the administrative support and logistics required. They have also included sample syllabi, assignments and assessments, and classroom activities.

The projects are applicable in a liberal arts education, in engineering programs, in two and four year colleges, in public and private universities⁠—any institution with first year undergraduate students that wants to actively engage them in understanding and solving real-world problems through project work. Evidence shows that project-based learning, with real world, team-based educational experiences, increases the engagement and retention rate of underserved students. Introducing project-based learning in the first year can set the stage for incorporating the culture and practice of inclusive excellence as foundation for learning on college and university campuses.
The Missing Course
Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching
By David Gooblar · 2019
Harvard University Press
College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are still trained to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom.

There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. But most academics have neither the time nor the resources to catch up to the latest research or train themselves to be excellent teachers. The Missing Course offers scholars at all levels a field guide to the state of the art in teaching and learning and is packed with invaluable insights to help students learn in any discipline.

Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to course design to getting students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much students learn. Along the way, readers will find ideas and tips they can use in their classrooms right away.
Designing Effective Teaching and Significant Learning
By Zala Fashant, Linda Russell, Stewart Ross, Jake Jacobson, Karen LaPlant, and Sheri Hutchinson · 2019
Stylus
Designing courses to deliver effective teaching and significant learning is the best way to set students up for success, and this book guides readers through the process. The authors have worked with faculty world-wide, and share the stories of how faculty have transformed courses from theory to practice. They start with Dee Fink’s foundation of integrating course design. Then they provide additional design concepts to expand the course blueprint to implement plans for communication, accessibility, technology integration, as well as the assessment of course design as it fits into the assessment of programs and institutions, and how faculty can use what they learn to meet their professional goals.
The Craft of Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning
A Guide for Faculty Development
By Marshall Welch and Star Plaxton-Moore · 2019
Stylus
Using a conversational voice, the authors provide a foundation as well as a blueprint and tools to craft a community-engaged course. Based on extensive research, the book provides a scope and sequence of information and skills ranging from an introduction to community engagement, to designing, implementing, and assessing a course, to advancing the craft to prepare for promotion and tenure as well as how to become a citizen-scholar and reflective practitioner. An interactive workbook that can be downloaded from Campus Compact accompanies this tool kit with interactive activities that are interspersed throughout the chapters. The book and workbook can be used by individual readers or with a learning community.
Connected Teaching
Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education
By Harriet L. Schwartz · 2019
Stylus
At a time when many aspects of the faculty role are in question, Harriet Schwartz argues that the role of teachers is as important as ever and is evolving profoundly. She believes the relationships faculty have with individual students and with classes and cohorts are the essential driver of teaching and learning.

This book explores teaching as a relational practice – a practice wherein connection and disconnection with students, power, identity, and emotion shape the teaching and learning endeavor. The author describes moments of energetic deep learning and what makes these powerful moments happen. She calls on readers to be open to and seek relationship, understand their own socio-cultural identity (and how this shapes internal experience and the ways in which they are met in the world), and vigilantly explore and recognize emotion in the teaching endeavor.

Connected Teaching is informed and inspired by Relational Cultural Theory (RCT). The premise of RCT is that the experience of engaging in growth-fostering interactions and relationships is essential to human development. RCT’s founding scholars believed the theory would be relevant in many different settings, but this is the first book to apply them to teaching and learning in higher education. In this book, the author shows that RCT has much to offer those devoted to student learning and development, providing a foundation from which to understand the transformative potential of teaching as a relational practice.
Convergent Teaching
Tools to Spark Deeper Learning in College
By Aaron M. Pallas and Anna Nuemann · 2019
Johns Hopkins University Press
Amid the wide-ranging public debate about the future of higher education is a tension about the role of the faculty as instructors versus researchers and the role of teaching in the mission of a university. What is absent from that discourse is any clear understanding of what constitutes good teaching in college. In Convergent Teaching, masterful professors of education Aaron M. Pallas and Anna Neumann make the case that American higher education must hold fast to its core mission of fostering learning and growth for all people.

Arguing that colleges and universities do this best through their teaching function, the book portrays teaching as a professional practice that teachers should actively hone. Drawing on rich research on K–12 classroom teaching, the authors develop the novel idea of convergent teaching, an approach that attends simultaneously to what students are learning and the personal, social, and cultural contexts shaping this process. Convergent teaching, they write, spurs teachers to join students' cognitions with the students' emotions and identities as they learn. Offering new ways to think about how college teachers can support and advance their students' learning of core disciplinary ideas, Pallas and Neumann outline targeted actions that campus administrators, public policy makers, and foundation leaders can take to propel such efforts. Vivid examples of instructors enacting three key principles—targeting, surfacing, and navigating—help bring the idea of convergent teaching to life.

Full of research-based, practical ideas for better teaching and learning, Convergent Teaching presents numerous instances of successful campus-based initiatives. It also sets a bold agenda for disciplinary organizations, philanthropies, and the federal government to support teaching improvement. This book will challenge higher education students while motivating college administrators and faculty to enact change on their campuses.
Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Notes from a White Professor
By Cyndi Kernahan · 2019
West Virginia University Press
Teaching about race and racism can be a difficult business. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.

In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.
Intentional Tech
Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching
By Derek Bruff · 2019
West Virginia University Press
Chalkboards and projectors are familiar tools for most college faculty, but when new technologies become available, instructors aren’t always sure how to integrate them into their teaching in meaningful ways. For faculty interested in supporting student learning, determining what’s possible and what’s useful can be challenging in the changing landscape of technology.

Arguing that teaching and learning goals should drive instructors’ technology use, not the other way around, Intentional Tech explores seven research-based principles for matching technology to pedagogy. Through stories of instructors who creatively and effectively use educational technology, author Derek Bruff approaches technology not by asking “How to?” but by posing a more fundamental question: “Why?”
Small Teaching Online
Applying Learning Science in Online Classes
By Flower Darby and James M. Lang · 2019
Jossey-Bass
The concept of small teaching is simple: small and strategic changes have enormous power to improve student learning. Instructors face unique and specific challenges when teaching an online course. This book offers small teaching strategies that will positively impact the online classroom.

This book outlines practical and feasible applications of theoretical principles to help your online students learn. It includes current best practices around educational technologies, strategies to build community and collaboration, and minor changes you can make in your online teaching practice, small but impactful adjustments that result in significant learning gains.
  • Explains how you can support your online students
  • Helps your students find success in this non-traditional learning environment
  • Covers online and blended learning
  • Addresses specific challenges that online instructors face in higher education
Geeky Pedagogy
A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers
By Jessamyn Neuhaus · 2019
West Virginia University Press
Geeky Pedagogy is a funny, evidence-based, multidisciplinary, pragmatic, highly readable guide to the process of learning and relearning how to be an effective college teacher. It is the first college teaching guide that encourages faculty to embrace their inner nerd, inviting readers to view themselves and their teaching work in light of contemporary discourse that celebrates increasingly diverse geek culture and explores stereotypes about super-smart introverts.

Geeky Pedagogy avoids the excessive jargon, humorlessness, and endless proscriptions that plague much published advice about teaching. Neuhaus is aware of how embodied identity and employment status shape one’s teaching context, and she eschews formulaic depictions of idealized exemplar teaching, instead inviting readers to join her in an engaging, critically reflective conversation about the vicissitudes of teaching and learning in higher education as a geek, introvert, or nerd. Written for the wonks and eggheads who want to translate their vast scholarly expertise into authentic student learning, Geeky Pedagogy is packed with practical advice and encouragement for increasing readers’ pedagogical knowledge.
Differentiated Instruction Made Practical
Engaging the Extremes Through Classroom Routines
By Rhonda Bondie and Akane Zusho · 2018
Routledge
Need to decide when, why, and how to differentiate instruction in the classroom? Differentiated Instruction Made Practical introduces teachers to All Learners Learning Every Day (ALL-ED), an easy-to-use framework that enables tailored instruction for every learner. These unique, self-regulated learning routines were developed by an experienced K-12 teacher and researcher in collaboration with an educational psychology scholar. Filled with useful classroom examples, evaluation procedures, self-reflection activities, and relevant background information, this essential guide will help classroom teachers think on their feet and promote success for all students―not just the middle of the pack.
Grading for Equity
What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms
By Joe Feldman · 2018
Corwin
Here at last—and none too soon—is a resource that delivers the research base, tools, and courage to tackle one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today’s schools: our inconsistent grading practices and the ways they can inadvertently perpetuate the achievement and opportunity gaps among our students.

With Grading for Equity, Joe Feldman cuts to the core of the conversation, revealing how grading practices that are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational will improve learning, minimize grade inflation, reduce failure rates, and become a lever for creating stronger teacher-student relationships and more caring classrooms. Essential reading for schoolwide and individual book study or for student advocates, Grading for Equity provides:
  • A critical historical backdrop, describing how our inherited system of grading was originally set up as a sorting mechanism to provide or deny opportunity, control students, and endorse a “fixed mindset” about students’ academic potential—practices that are still in place a century later
  • A summary of the research on motivation and equitable teaching and learning, establishing a rock-solid foundation and a “true north” orientation toward equitable grading practices
  • Specific grading practices that are more equitable, along with teacher examples, strategies to solve common hiccups and concerns, and evidence of effectiveness
  • Reflection tools for facilitating individual or group engagement and understanding
Learning Analytics Goes to School
A Collaborative Approach to Improving Education
By Andrew Krumm, Barbara Means, and Marie Bienkowski · 2018
Routledge
Learning analytics is growing in importance in colleges, polytechnics and universities. A new consortium in the UK of some thirty institutions are sharing data and building algorithms, which can be used to both support the more focused recruitment of students, support students on their learning journey and aid retention and completion. But how does an institution start this work and what challenges will they face? This very "hands-on" book helps administrators think through this journey and helps them understand the challenge of taking analytic data and turning it into meaningful action. The book emphasizes the importance of collaborative design and deliberate engagement of faculty and student support staff at the beginning of this journey. Adoption of learning analytics is not a technological solution, it is an institutional one.
Assessing Student Learning
A Common Sense Guide. 3rd edition
By Linda Suskie · 2018
Jossey-Bass
Assessing Student Learning is a standard reference for college faculty and administrators, and the third edition of this highly regarded book continues to offer comprehensive, practical, plainspoken guidance. The third edition adds a stronger emphasis on making assessment useful; greater attention to building a culture in which assessment is used to inform important decisions; an enhanced focus on the many settings of assessment, especially general education and co-curricula; a new emphasis on synthesizing evidence of student learning into an overall picture of an integrated learning experience; new chapters on curriculum design and assessing the hard-to-assess; more thorough information on organizing assessment processes; new frameworks for rubric design and setting standards and targets; and many new resources.
Teaching Race
How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism
By Stephen D. Brookfield · 2018
Jossey-Bass
Educators and activists frequently call for the need to address the lingering presence of racism in higher education. Yet few books offer specific suggestions and advice on how to introduce race to students who believe we live in a post-racial world where racism is no longer a real issue. In Teaching Race the author offers practical tools and techniques for teaching and discussing racial issues at predominately White institutions of higher education. As current events highlight the dynamics surrounding race and racism on campus and the world beyond, this book provides teachers with essential training to facilitate productive discussion and raise racial awareness in the classroom. A variety of teaching and learning experts provide insights, tips, and guidance on running classroom discussions on race. Brookfield presents effective approaches and activities to bring reluctant students into a consideration of race and explore how White teachers can model racial awareness, thereby inviting students into the process of examining their own white identity.

Racism, whether evident in overt displays or subconscious bias, has repercussions that reverberate far beyond the campus grounds. As the cultural climate increasingly calls out for more research, education, and dialogue on race and racism, this book helps teachers spotlight issues related to race in a way that leads to effective classroom and campus conversation. The book provides guidance on how to:
  • Create the conditions that facilitate respectful racial dialogue by building trust and effectively negotiating conflict
  • Uncover each student’s own subconscious bias and the intersectionality that exists even in the most homogenous-appearing classrooms
  • Help students embrace discomfort, and adapt discussion methods to accommodate issues of race and positionality
  • Avoid common traps, mistakes, and misconceptions encountered in anti-racist teaching
Predominantly White institutions face a number of challenges in dealing with race issues, including a lack of precedence, an absence of modeling by campus leaders, and little clear guidance on how teachers can identify and challenge racism on campus. Teaching Race is packed with activities, suggestions and exercises to provide practical real-world help for teachers trying to introduce race in class.
Hitting Pause
65 Lecture Breaks to Refresh and Reinforce Learning
By Gail Taylor Rice · 2018
Stylus
Pauses constitute a simple technique for enlivening and enhancing the effectiveness of lectures, or indeed of any form of instruction, whether a presentation or in an experiential setting. This book presents the evidence and rationale for breaking up lectures into shorter segments by using pauses to focus attention, reinforce key points, and review learning. It also provides 65 adaptable pause ideas to use at the opening of class, mid-way through, or as closers.

Starting with brain science research on attention span and cognitive load, Rice bases her book on two fundamental principles: shorter segments of instruction are better than longer ones, and learners who actively participate in instruction learn better than those who don’t.

Pausing helps teachers apply these principles and create student engagement without requiring major changes in their lesson plans. With careful planning, they can integrate pauses into learning sessions with ease and significantly reinforce student learning. They will also gain feedback on students’ comprehension.

Rice sets out the characteristics of good pauses, gives advice on how to plan them and how to introduce them to maximum effect. She provides compelling examples and concludes with a repertory of pauses readers can easily modify and apply to any discipline.

This book contains a compendium of strategies that any teacher can fruitfully use to reinforce learning, as well as a stepping stone to those seeking to transition to more active learning methods.
Difficult Subjects
Insights and Strategies for Teaching about Race, Sexuality, and Gender
By Badia Ahad-Legardy and OiYan A. Poon · 2018
Stylus
Difficult Subjects: Insights and Strategies for Teaching about Race, Sexuality and Gender is a collection of essays from scholars across disciplines, institutions, and ranks that offers diverse and multi-faceted approaches to teaching about subjects that prove both challenging and often uncomfortable for both the professor and the student. It encourages college educators to engage in forms of practice that do not pretend that teachers and students are unaffected by world events and incidents that highlight social inequalities. Readers will find the collected essays useful for identifying new approaches to taking on the “difficult subjects” of race, gender, and sexuality.

The book will also serve as inspiration for academics who believe that their area of study does not allow for such pedagogical inquiries to also teach in ways that address difficult subjects. Contributors to this volume span a range of disciplines from criminal justice to gender studies to organic chemistry, and demonstrate the productive possibilities that can emerge in college classrooms when faculty consider “identity” as constitutive of rather than divorced from their academic disciplines.

Discussions of race, gender, and sexuality are always hot-button issues in the college classroom, whether they emerge in response to a national event or tragedy or constitute the content of the class over a semester-long term. Even seasoned professors who specialize in these areas find it difficult to talk about identity politics in a room full of students. And many professors for whom issues of racial, and sexual identity is not a primary concern find it even more challenging to raise these issues with students.

Offering reflections and practical guidance, the book accounts for a range of challenges facing college educators, and encourages faculty to teach with courage and conviction, especially when it feels as though the world around us is crashing down upon our students and ourselves.
Designing a Motivational Syllabus
Creating a Learning Path for Student Engagement
By Christine Harrington and Melissa Thomas · 2018
Stylus
A thoughtfully constructed syllabus can be transformative for your students’ learning, communicating the path they can take to succeed.

This book demonstrates how, rather than being a mundane document to convey policies, you can construct your syllabus to be a motivating resource that conveys a clear sense of your course’s learning goals, how students can achieve those goals, and makes evident your teaching philosophy and why you have adopted the teaching strategies you will use, such as discussion or group activities.

Developing or revising a syllabus also presents you with a perfect opportunity to review the learning possibilities for the semester. Well-designed, it can help you stay focused on achieving the learning outcomes, as well as determine if the class is on track and whether adjustments to the schedule are needed.

The authors show how, by adopting a welcoming tone and clearly stating learning outcomes, your syllabus can engage students by explaining the relevance of your course to their studies, create an all-important positive first impression of you as an instructor, and guide students through the resources you will be using, the assignments ahead, as well as clear guidance on how they will be assessed. Referred to frequently as the course progresses, an effective syllabus will keep students engaged and on task.

Christine Harrington and Melissa Thomas lead you through all the elements of a syllabus to help you identify how to present key messages and information about your course, think through the impressions you want to create, and, equally importantly, suggest how you can use layout and elements such as images and charts to make your syllabus visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Creating Wicked Students
Designing Courses for a Complex World
By Paul Hanstedt · 2018
Stylus
In Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt argues that courses can and should be designed to present students with what are known as “wicked problems” because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college. As the author puts it, “this book begins with the assumption that what we all want for our students is that they be capable of changing the world….When a student leaves college, we want them to enter the world not as drones participating mindlessly in activities to which they’ve been appointed, but as thinking, deliberative beings who add something to society.”

There’s a lot of talk in education these days about “wicked problems”—problems that defy traditional expectations or knowledge, problems that evolve over time: Zika, ISIS, political discourse in the era of social media. To prepare students for such wicked problems, they need to have wicked competencies, the ability to respond easily and on the fly to complex challenges. Unfortunately, a traditional education that focuses on content and skills often fails to achieve this sense of wickedness. Students memorize for the test, prepare for the paper, practice the various algorithms over and over again—but when the parameters or dynamics of the test or the paper or the equation change, students are often at a loss for how to adjust.

This is a course design book centered on the idea that the goal in the college classroom—in all classrooms, all the time—is to develop students who are not just loaded with content, but capable of using that content in thoughtful, deliberate ways to make the world a better place. Achieving this goal requires a top-to-bottom reconsideration of courses, including student learning goals, text selection and course structure, day-to-day pedagogies, and assignment and project design. Creating Wicked Students takes readers through each step of the process, providing multiple examples at each stage, while always encouraging instructors to consider concepts and exercises in light of their own courses and students.
Creating the Path to Success in the Classroom
Teaching to Close the Graduation Gap for Minority, First-Generation, and Academically Unprepared Students
By Kathleen F. Gabriel · 2018
Stylus
This is a book for all faculty who are concerned with promoting the persistence of all students whom they teach.

Most recognize that faculty play a major role in student retention and success because they typically have more direct contact with students than others on campus. However, little attention has been paid to role of the faculty in this specific mission or to the corresponding characteristics of teaching, teacher-student interactions, and connection to student affairs activities that lead to students’ long-term engagement, to their academic success, and ultimately to graduation.

At a time when the numbers of underrepresented students – working adults, minority, first-generation, low-income, and international students – is increasing, this book, a companion to her earlier Teaching Underprepared Students, addresses that lack of specific guidance by providing faculty with additional evidence-based instructional practices geared toward reaching all the students in their classrooms, including those from groups that traditionally have been the least successful, while maintaining high standards and expectations.

Recognizing that there are no easy answers, Kathleen Gabriel offers faculty ideas that can be incorporated in, or modified to align with, faculty’s existing teaching methods. She covers topics such as creating a positive and inclusive course climate, fostering a community of learners, increasing engagement and students’ interactions, activating connections with culturally relevant material, reinforcing self-efficacy with growth mindset and mental toughness techniques, improving lectures by building in meaningful educational activities, designing reading and writing assignments for stimulating deep learning and critical thinking, and making grade and assessment choices that can promote learning.
Creating Engaging Discussions
Strategies for Avoiding Crickets in Any Size Classroom and Online
By Jennifer H. Herman, Linda Nilson, and Stephen D. Brookfield · 2018
Stylus
If you have ever been apprehensive about initiating classroom discussion, fearing silences, the domination of a couple of speakers, superficial contributions, or off-topic remarks, this book provides strategies for creating a positive learning experience.

Jennifer H. Herman and Linda B. Nilson demonstrate how to create the conditions to facilitate deep and meaningful learning as well as to assess the effectiveness of discussions. They identify, analyze, and solve common problems in both classroom and online discussions and in both small and large classes. They take a direct, practice-oriented approach that⁠—in acknowledging common challenges⁠—provides principles, guidance on design, examples of activities and techniques, and eight detailed case studies. These cases demonstrate successful approaches that faculty across disciplines and from a variety of institutions have adopted in their face-to-face, blended, or online courses at the undergraduate or graduate level.

The case authors begin by describing the original pedagogical challenge they faced and explain how they addressed it and assessed the results of their innovation. They also offer practical recommendations to readers who may want to try their strategies. The final chapter provides a set of resources and activities – including discussion questions on the case studies, writing prompts, and jigsaw formats – that are equally appropriate for individual study or for use in workshop environments.
Meaningful Grading
A Guide for Faculty in the Arts
By Natasha Haugnes, Hoag Holmgren, and Martin Springborg · 2018
West Virginia University Press
College and university faculty in the arts (visual, studio, language, music, design, and others) regularly grade and assess undergraduate student work but often with little guidance or support. As a result, many arts faculty, especially new faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate student instructors, feel bewildered and must “reinvent the wheel” when grappling with the challenges and responsibilities of grading and assessing student work.

Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts enables faculty to create and implement effective assessment methodologies—research based and field tested—in traditional and online classrooms. In doing so, the book reveals how the daunting challenges of grading in the arts can be turned into opportunities for deeper student learning, increased student engagement, and an enlivened pedagogy.
High-Impact Practices in Online Education
Research and Best Practices
By Kathryn E. Linder and Chrysanthemum Mattison Hayes · 2018
Stylus
This volume offers the first comprehensive guide to how high-impact practices (HIPs) are being implemented in online environments and how they can be adjusted to meet the needs of online learners. This multi-disciplinary approach will assist faculty and administrators to effectively implement HIPs in distance education courses and online programs.

With a chapter devoted to each of the eleven HIPs, this collection offers guidance that takes into account the differences between e-learners and traditional on-campus students.

A primary goal of High-Impact Practices Online is to share the ways in which HIPs may need to be amended to meet the needs of online learners. Through specific examples and practical suggestions in each chapter, readers are introduced to concrete strategies for transitioning HIPs to the online environment that can be utilized across a range of disciplines and institution types. Each chapter of High-Impact Practices Online also references the most recent and relevant literature on each HIP so that readers are brought up to date on what makes online HIPs successful.
Teaching the Literature Survey Course
New Strategies for College Faculty
By Gwynn Dujardin, James M. Lang, and John A. Staunton · 2018
West Virginia University Press
Teaching the Literature Survey Course makes the case for maintaining—even while re-imagining and re-inventing—the place of the survey as a transformative experience for literature students. Through essays both practical and theoretical, the collection presents survey teachers with an exciting range of new strategies for energizing their teaching and engaging their students in this vital encounter with our evolving literary traditions.

From mapping early English literature to a team-based approach to the American survey, and from multimedia galleries to a “blank syllabus,” contributors propose alternatives to the traditional emphasis on lectures and breadth of coverage. The volume is at once a set of practical suggestions for working teachers (including sample documents like worksheets and syllabi) and a provocative engagement with the question of what introductory courses can and should be.
Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone
Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education
By Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling · 2018
West Virginia University Press
Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built environment “just part of what we do.” We no longer see curb cuts, for instance, as accommodations for people with disabilities, but perceive their usefulness every time we ride our bikes or push our strollers through crosswalks.

This is also a perfect model for Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework grounded in the neuroscience of why, what, and how people learn. Tobin and Behling show that, although it is often associated with students with disabilities, UDL can be profitably broadened toward a larger ease-of-use and general diversity framework. Captioned instructional videos, for example, benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night or those studying on a noisy team bus.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is aimed at faculty members, faculty-service staff, disability support providers, student-service staff, campus leaders, and graduate students who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students. It includes resources for readers who want to become UDL experts and advocates: real-world case studies, active-learning techniques, UDL coaching skills, micro- and macro-level UDL-adoption guidance, and use-them-now resources.
How Humans Learn
The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching
By Joshua R. Eyler · 2018
West Virginia University Press
Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.
33 Simple Strategies for Faculty
A Week-By-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students
By Lisa M. Nunn · 2018
Rutgers University Press
Many students struggle with the transition from high school to university life. This is especially true of first-generation college students, who are often unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of academia. College professors usually want to help, but many feel overwhelmed by the prospect of making extra time in their already hectic schedules to meet with these struggling students.

33 Simple Strategies for Faculty is a guidebook filled with practical solutions to this problem. It gives college faculty concrete exercises and tools they can use both inside and outside of the classroom to effectively bolster the academic success and wellbeing of their students. To devise these strategies, educational sociologist Lisa M. Nunn talked with a variety of first-year college students, learning what they find baffling and frustrating about their classes, as well as what they love about their professors’ teaching.

Combining student perspectives with the latest research on bridging the academic achievement gap, she shows how professors can make a difference by spending as little as fifteen minutes a week helping their students acculturate to college life. Whether you are a new faculty member or a tenured professor, you are sure to find 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty to be an invaluable resource.
Minds on Fire
How Role-Immersion Games Transform College
By Mark C. Carnes · 2018
Harvard University Press
Why are so many students intellectually disengaged? Faculty, administrators, and tuition-paying parents have been asking this question for nearly two centuries. And the answer is always more or less the same: students are so deeply absorbed in competitive social play (fraternities, sports, beer pong, World of Warcraft, social media) that they neglect academics.

In Minds on Fire, Mark Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo’s trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy expectations. Students think more critically by internalizing alternative selves, and they understand the past better by filtering it through their present. Fierce competition between opposing sides leads to strong community bonds among teammates and develops speaking, writing, leadership, and problem-solving skills.

Minds on Fire is a provocative critique of educational reformers who deplored role-playing pedagogies, from Plato to Dewey to Erikson. Carnes also makes an impassioned appeal for pedagogical innovation. At a time when cost-cutting legislators and trustees are increasingly drawn to online learning, Carnes focuses on how bricks-and-mortar institutions of higher education can set young minds on fire.
Interactive Lecturing
A Handbook for College Faculty
By Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major · 2018
Jossey-Bass
Have you ever looked out across your students only to find them staring at their computers or smartphones rather than listening attentively to you? Have you ever wondered what you could do to encourage students to resist distractions and focus on the information you are presenting? Have you ever wished you could help students become active learners as they listen to you lecture?

Interactive Lecturing is designed to help faculty members more effectively lecture. This practical resource addresses such pertinent questions as, “How can lecture presentations be more engaging?” “How can we help students learn actively during lecture instead of just sitting and passively listening the entire time?” The authors provide practical tips on creating and delivering engaging lectures as well as concrete techniques to help teachers ensure students are active and fully engaged participants in the learning process before, during, and after lecture presentations.

Research shows that most college faculty still rely predominantly on traditional lectures as their preferred teaching technique. However, research also underscores the fact that more students fail lecture-based courses than classes with active learning components. Interactive Lecturing combines engaging presentation tips with active learning techniques specifically chosen to help students learn as they listen to a lecture. It is a proven teaching and learning strategy that can be readily incorporated into every teacher’s methods.

In addition to providing a synthesis of relevant, contemporary research and theory on lecturing as it relates to teaching and learning, this book features 53 tips on how to deliver engaging presentations and 32 techniques you can assign students to do to support their learning during your lecture. The tips and techniques can be used across instructional methods and academic disciplines both onsite (including small lectures and large lecture halls) as well as in online courses.
Academic Ableism
Disability and Higher Education
By Jay T. Dolmage · 2017
University of Michigan Press
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.
Teaching the Whole Student
Engaged Learning with Heart, Mind, and Spirit
By David Schoem, Christine Modey, and Edward P. St. John · 2017
Stylus
Teaching the Whole Student is a compendium of engaged teaching approaches by faculty across disciplines. These inspiring authors offer models for instructors who care deeply about their students, respect and recognize students’ social identities and lived experiences, and are interested in creating community and environments of openness and trust to foster deep-learning, academic success, and meaning-making.

The authors in this volume stretch the boundaries of academic learning and the classroom experience by seeking to identify the space between subject matter and a student's core values and prior knowledge. They work to find the interconnectedness of knowledge, understanding, meaning, inquiry and truth. They appreciate that students bring their full lives and experiences—their heart and spirit—into the classroom just as they bring their minds and intellectual inquiry.

These approaches contribute to student learning and the core academic purposes of higher education, help students find meaning and purpose in their lives, and help strengthen our diverse democracy through students’ active participation and leadership in civic life. They also have a demonstrated impact on critical and analytical thinking, student retention and academic success, personal well-being, commitments to civic engagement, diversity, and social justice.
Dynamic Lecturing
Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness
By Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek · 2017
Stylus
Is the lecture an outmoded teaching method that inhibits active learning or is it a potentially powerful tool that is an essential part of every teacher’s repertoire?

This book presents up-to-date research on the different types of lecture, on what constitutes effective lecturing, and on the impact of lecturing when done appropriately and well. It fills the void in professional development resources on how to lecture, validating the practice when it’s aligned with the educational mission of creating engaged learning environments.

Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek demonstrate that, rather than lecture and active learning being mutually exclusive or either-or propositions, the effectiveness of the former can be greatly enhanced when combined with active learning techniques through what they define as dynamic lecturing; and provide context about the need to balance these approaches to meet the needs of students as they progress from novice to advanced learners.

They present a range of strategies that enhance student learning during lectures. They open each chapter with the evidence behind each lecturing strategy they describe, and conclude with practical suggestions for quick application in the classroom. They offer readers the lecture planning and evaluation tools for reworking their lectures in ways that provide high-level engagement and achievement for their students.

The opening section of the book explores the benefits of lecturing and describes the different modalities of lecture, with an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of each. The second section focuses on educational strategies to enhance the lecture, including, among others, activating prior knowledge, emphasizing important points, effectively using multi-media, making concepts meaningful via examples, and the importance of retrieval practice. Each covers the underlying theory and research, and advice on how to align the engagement techniques with instructional goals. The book concludes with guidance on effective planning for lecturing and helping chairs, administrators, or peers engage in effective evaluation of the lecture.
Why Students Resist Learning
A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students
By Anton O. Tolman and Janine Kremling · 2017
Stylus
However personally committed faculty may be to helping students learn, their students are not always as eager to participate in this endeavor, and may react with both active and passive resistant behaviors, including poor faculty evaluations.

The purpose of this book is to help faculty develop a coherent and integrated understanding of the various causes of student resistance to learning, providing them with a rationale for responding constructively, and enabling them to create conditions conducive to implementing effective learning strategies.

In this book readers will discover an innovative integrated model that accounts for student behaviors and creates a foundation for intentional and informed discussion, evaluation, and the development of effective counter strategies. The model takes into account institutional context, environmental forces, students’ prior negative classroom experiences, their cognitive development, readiness to change, and metacognition. The various chapters take the reader through the model’s elements, exploring their practical implications for teaching, whether relating to course design, assessments, assignments, or interactions with students.

The book includes a chapter written entirely by students, offering their insights into the causes of resistance, and their reflections on how participating on this project has affected them.
Bandwidth Recovery
Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization
By Cia Verschelden · 2017
Stylus
This book argues that the cognitive resources for learning of over half our young people have been diminished by the negative effects of economic insecurity, discrimination and hostility against non-majority groups based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and other aspects of difference. Recognizing that these students are no different than their peers in terms of cognitive capacity, this book offers a set of strategies and interventions to rebuild the available cognitive resources necessary to succeed in college and reach their full potential.

Members of these groups systematically experience conditions in their lives that result in chronic stress and, therefore, decreased physical and mental health and social and economic opportunity. The costs of the many kinds of scarcity in their lives – money, health, respect, safety, affirmation, choices, belonging – is seriously reduced “mental bandwidth,” the cognitive and emotional resources needed to deal with making good decisions, learning, healthy relationships, and more. People who are operating with depleted mental bandwidth are less able to succeed in school, starting in childhood, and are much less likely to make it to college. For those who do make it, their bandwidth capacity often interferes with learning, and therefore, persisting and graduating from college.

This book presents variety of evidence-based interventions that have been shown, through implementation in high schools and colleges, to help students to regain bandwidth. They are variously intended for application inside and outside the classroom and address not only cognitive processes but also social-psychological, non-cognitive factors that are relevant to the college environment as a whole.

Beginning with an analysis of the impacts on mental and physical health and cognitive capacity, of poverty, racism, and other forms of social marginalization, Cia Verschelden presents strategies for promoting a growth mindset and self-efficacy, for developing supports that build upon students’ values and prior knowledge and for creating learning environments both in and out of the classroom so students can feel a sense of belonging and community. She addresses issues of stereotyping and exclusion and discusses institutional structures and processes that create identity-safe rather than identity-threat learning environment.
Game On!
Gamification, Gameful Design, and the Rise of the Gamer Educator
By Kevin Bell · 2017
Johns Hopkins University Press
The changing student body in American higher education demands a new approach to teaching, one that moves toward inclusive, hyperpersonalized learning environments that have much in common with games and social media. Kevin Bell’s Game On! presents dynamic case studies of gamer educators and game-derived techniques to help instructors creatively formulate their own teaching strategies.

Breaking gamefully designed classes into their component parts, Bell analyzes what these classes are actually doing and explains why they work. He offers faculty a rubric to assess their own courses for their propensity to engage students, particularly those from low socioeconomic and high-risk populations. Bell explores how game design, pedagogy, and intrinsic motivators can level the playing field to produce rigorous learning environments that are as addictive to all participants as the latest apps and social media systems. He also discusses best practices, lays out the broader context of computer-mediated teaching and learning, and considers the challenges and opportunities that gamification presents.

Instructors would do well to consider the key tenets of successful games if they are to engage and graduate the coming generations of learners. Bell’s careful analysis of the theories behind gamification, cognitive science, and instructional design will help them to do just that.
Flipped Learning
A Guide for Higher Education Faculty
By Robert Talbert · 2017
Stylus
Flipped learning is an approach to the design and instruction of classes through which, with appropriate guidance, students gain their first exposure to new concepts and material prior to class, thus freeing up time during class for the activities where students typically need the most help, such as applications of the basic material and engaging in deeper discussions and creative work with it.

While flipped learning has generated a great deal of excitement, given the evidence demonstrating its potential to transform students’ learning, engagement and metacognitive skills, there has up to now been no comprehensive guide to using this teaching approach in higher education.

Robert Talbert, who has close to a decade’s experience using flipped learning for majors in his discipline, in general education courses, in large and small sections, as well as online courses – and is a frequent workshop presenter and speaker on the topic – offers faculty a practical, step-by-step, “how-to” to this powerful teaching method.

He addresses readers who want to explore this approach to teaching, those who have recently embarked on it, as well as experienced practitioners, balancing an account of research on flipped learning and its theoretical bases, with course design concepts to guide them set up courses to use flipped learning effectively, tips and case studies of actual classes across various disciplines, and practical considerations such as obtaining buy-in from students, and getting students to do the pre-class activities.
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher
2nd edition
By Stephen D. Brookfield · 2017
Jossey-Bass
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher is a landmark guide to critical reflection, providing expert insight and practical tools to facilitate a journey of constructive self-critique. Stephen Brookfield shows how you can uncover and assess your assumptions about practice by viewing them through the lens of your students' eyes, your colleagues' perceptions, relevant theory and research, and your own personal experience.

This fully revised second edition features new chapters on critical reflection in the context of social media, teaching race and racism, leadership in a critically reflective key, and team teaching as critical reflection. In addition, all chapters have been thoroughly updated and expanded to align with today's classrooms, whether online or face-to-face, in large lecture formats or small groups.

In his own personal voice Stephen Brookfield draws from over 45 years of experience to illustrate the clear benefits of critical reflection. Assumptions guide practice and only when we base our actions on accurate assumptions will we achieve the results we want. Educators with the courage to challenge their own assumptions in an effort to improve learning are the invaluable role models our students need. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher provides the foundational information and practical tools that help teachers reach their true potential.
Teaching Interculturally
A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development
By Amy Lee, Robert K. Poch, Mary Katherine O'Brien, and Catherine Solheim · 2017
Stylus
Most faculty have multiple diversities present in any given classroom or academic program— whether from an influx of international students or an increase of students from low-income, first generation, and/or racial/ethnic minority populations— and are concerned about how to maintain a rigorous curriculum and ensure that all their students succeed, given disparate backgrounds and varying degrees of prior knowledge.

This book provides faculty and instructors with a theoretical foundation, practical tools, and an iterative and reflective process for designing and implementing an intercultural pedagogy. The authors bring to bear the expertise of their various disciplinary backgrounds to offer a responsive, integrative framework to develop and continually refine a pedagogy that both promotes deep disciplinary learning and supports intercultural outcomes for all students.

The authors offer a framework that is flexible enough to be responsive to the experience, environment, and particulars of a given teaching and learning situation. The text incorporates narrative text by the authors, as well as first-person reflections, classroom activities, and annotated assignments that illustrate the dynamic process of intention, experiment/implement, critique, and refinement that characterize pedagogy and intercultural interaction.

The authors bring to bear the expertise of their various disciplinary backgrounds, a deep knowledge of effective pedagogical practice, and their experience and grounding in intercultural practice: Amy in composition/writing studies, Mary Katherine in international education with rich experience as a faculty development trainer, and Bob and Catherine, respectively, an historian and a family scientist.
Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks
Decode the Critical Thinking of Your Discipline
By Joan Middendorf and Leah Shopkow · 2017
Stylus
Decoding the Disciplines is a widely-used and proven methodology that prompts teachers to identify the bottlenecks – the places where students get stuck – that impede learners’ paths to expert thinking in a discipline. The process is based on recognizing the gap between novice learning and expert thinking, and uncovering tacit knowledge that may not be made manifest in teaching.

Through “decoding,” implicit expert knowledge can be turned into explicit mental tasks, and made available to students. This book presents a seven-step process for uncovering bottlenecks and determining the most effective way to enable students to surmount them.

The authors explain how to apply the seven steps of Decoding the Disciplines – how to identify bottlenecks, unpack the critical thinking of experts, teach students how to do this kind of thinking, and how to evaluate the degree to which students have learned to do it. They provide in-depth descriptions of each step and, at the end of each chapter, at least one exercise the reader can do on his or her own. Because the decoding process works well with groups, they also provide exercises for leading groups through the process, making available to informal groups as well as groups led by professional developers, the tools to transform their understanding of teaching and learning by getting the student view that they refer to as “the bottleneck perspective.”

Because it focuses on the mental moves that underlie the cognitive competencies we want students to develop, spelling out what critical thinking consists of for any field, the methodology helps teachers to get beyond focus on content delivery and transmission and provides criteria to select from the bewildering array of teaching tools the methods most appropriate to what they are teaching.
Improving How Universities Teach Science
Lessons from the Science Education Initiative
By Carl Wieman · 2017
Harvard University Press
Too many universities remain wedded to outmoded ways of teaching science in spite of extensive research showing that there are much more effective methods. Too few departments ask whether what happens in their lecture halls is effective at helping students to learn and how they can encourage their faculty to teach better. But real change is possible, and Carl Wieman shows us how it can be brought about.

Improving How Universities Teach Science draws on Wieman’s unparalleled experience to provide a blueprint for educators seeking sustainable improvements in science teaching. Wieman created the Science Education Initiative (SEI), a program implemented across thirteen science departments at the universities of Colorado and British Columbia, to support the widespread adoption of the best research-based approaches to science teaching. The program’s data show that in the most successful departments 90 percent of faculty adopted better methods. Wieman identifies what factors helped and hindered the adoption of good teaching methods. He also gives detailed, effective, and tested strategies for departments and institutions to measure and improve the quality of their teaching while limiting the demands on faculty time.
The Meaningful Writing Project
Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education
By Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner · 2017
Utah State University Press
In the face of the continuing discourse of crisis in US education, The Meaningful Writing Project offers readers an affirming story of writing in higher education that shares students’ experiences in their own voices. In presenting the results of a three-year study consisting of surveys and interviews of university seniors and their faculty across three diverse institutions, authors Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner consider students’ perceptions of their meaningful writing experiences, the qualities of those experiences, and instructors’ perspectives on assignment design and delivery.

This study confirms that meaningful assignments offer students opportunities to engage with instructors, peers, and texts and are relevant to past experiences and passions as well as to future aspirations and identities. Meaningful writing occurs across majors, in both required and elective courses, and beyond students’ years at college. Additionally, the study makes clear that faculty across the curriculum devote significant care and attention to creating writing assignments that support student learning, as they understand writing performance to be a developmental process connected to overall cognitive and social development, student engagement with learning, and success in a wide variety of disciplines and professions.

The Meaningful Writing Project provides writing center directors, WPAs, other composition scholars, and all faculty interested in teaching and learning with writing an unprecedented look into the writing projects students find meaningful.
Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn
A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults, 4th edition
By Raymond J. Wlodkowski and Margery B. Ginsberg · 2017
Jossey-Bass
The classic interdisciplinary reference on adult education, updated for today's learning environment.

Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn provides adult educators with the information and strategies they need to guide non-traditional students toward positive educational outcomes. Providing a clear framework, guidelines for instructional planning, real-world examples, and cutting-edge ideas, this book fills the need for intrinsically motivating instruction targeted specifically toward adults returning to school. This new fourth edition sharpens the focus on community colleges, where most first-generation college students and working adults begin their higher education, and explores the rising use of technology and alternative delivery methods including a new chapter covering online instruction.
  • Examine the latest neuroscience and psychological research pertaining to adult motivation and learning
  • Delve into alternative formats including online learning, interactive learning materials, and more
  • Elicit and encourage adult intrinsic motivation using the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching and sixty practical, research-backed strategies
  • Adopt a culturally responsive instructional approach for an inclusive and equitable learning environment.
Adult students differ from traditional students in motivation, attitude, experience, and more; this, combined with an increasingly diverse body of students as well electronic delivery methods, makes today's teaching environment a new landscape for instructors to navigate. Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn provides a clear guide to success for instructors and students alike.
Teaching and Learning STEM
A Practical Guide
By Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent · 2016
Jossey-Bass
Educational research has repeatedly shown that compared to traditional teacher-centered instruction, certain learner-centered methods lead to improved learning outcomes, greater development of critical high-level skills, and increased retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

Teaching and Learning STEM presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching STEM courses at the university, community college, and high school levels. The book draws on the authors' extensive backgrounds and decades of experience in STEM education and faculty development. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to implement the strategies in your courses and to deal effectively with problems (including student resistance) that might occur in the implementation. The book will help you:
  • Plan and conduct class sessions in which students are actively engaged, no matter how large the class is
  • Make good use of technology in face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses and flipped classrooms
  • Assess how well students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding the course is designed to teach
  • Help students develop expert problem-solving skills and skills in communication, creative thinking, critical thinking, high-performance teamwork, and self-directed learning
  • Meet the learning needs of STEM students with a broad diversity of attributes and backgrounds
The strategies presented in Teaching and Learning STEM don't require revolutionary time-intensive changes in your teaching, but rather a gradual integration of traditional and new methods. The result will be continual improvement in your teaching and your students' learning.
Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence
Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race
By Derald Wing Sue · 2016
Jossey-Bass
If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that "colorblindness" is the preferred approach, you must read this book. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

This significant work answers all your questions about discussing race by covering:
  • Characteristics of typical, unproductive conversations on race
  • Tacit and explicit social rules related to talking about racial issues
  • Race-specific difficulties and misconceptions regarding race talk
  • Concrete advice for educators and parents on approaching race in a new way
Teaching Across Cultural Strengths
A Guide to Balancing Integrated and Individuated Cultural Frameworks in College Teaching
By Alicia Fedelina Chavez and Susan Diana Longerbeam · 2016
Stylus
Promoting learning among college students is an elusive challenge, and all the more so when faculty and students come from differing cultures. This comprehensive guide addresses the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the role of culture in learning; and offers an empirically-based framework and model, together with practical strategies, to assist faculty in transforming college teaching for all their students through an understanding of and teaching to their strengths.

Recognizing that each student learns in culturally influenced ways, and that each instructor’s teaching is equally influenced by her or his background and experiences, the authors offer an approach by which teachers can progressively learn about culture while they transform their teaching through reflection and the application of new practices that enrich student learning.

The key premise of the book is that deepening student learning and increasing retention and graduation rates requires teaching from a strengths based perspective that recognizes the cultural assets that students bring to higher education, and to their own learning.

Derived through research and practice, the authors present their Model of Cultural Frameworks in College Teaching and Learning that highlights eight continua towards achieving the transformation of teaching, and developing more culturally balanced and inclusive practices, over time. They present techniques – illustrated by numerous examples and narratives – for building on cultural strengths in teaching; offer tips and strategies for teaching through cultural dilemmas; and provide culturally reflective exercises.
Guide to Teaching in the Active Learning Classroom
History, Research, and Practice
By Paul Baepler, J. D. Walker, D. Christopher Brooks, Kem Saichaie, and Christina I. Petersen · 2016
Stylus
While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room’s central focal point and disrupt the conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed.

The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls.

This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are:
  • How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space?
  • What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room?
  • How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces?
  • If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point?
  • How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class?
  • How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor?
  • How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces?
Community-Based Research
Teaching for Community Impact
By Mary Beckman and Joyce F. Long · 2016
Stylus
Community-based research (CBR) refers to collaborative investigation by academics and non-academic community members that fosters positive change on a local level. Despite recent trends toward engaged scholarship, few publications demonstrate how to effectively integrate CBR into academic course work or take advantage of its potential for achieving community change.

Community-Based Research: Teaching for Community Impact fills these gaps by providing:
  • An overview of language and methods used by professionals engaged in CBR
  • A framework for orienting CBR toward concrete community outcomes
  • Effective ways to integrate CBR into course content, student-driven projects, and initiatives spanning disciplines, curricula, campuses and countries
  • Lessons learned in working toward positive outcomes for students and in communities
This text is designed for faculty, graduate students, service-learning and other engaged learning and scholarship practitioners, alliance members, special interest groups, and organizations that desire to strengthen student learning and utilize research for improvement in their communities.
Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment
The Global Relevance of Critical and Inclusive Pedagogies in Higher Education
By Frank Tuitt, Chayla Haynes, and Saran Stewart · 2016
Stylus
At a time of impending demographic shifts, faculty and administrators in higher education around the world are becoming aware of the need to address the systemic practices and barriers that contribute to inequitable educational outcomes of racially and ethnically diverse students.

Focusing on the higher education learning environment, this volume illuminates the global relevance of critical and inclusive pedagogies (CIP), and demonstrates how their application can transform the teaching and learning process and promote more equitable educational outcomes among all students, but especially racially minoritized students.

The examples in this book illustrate the importance of recognizing the detrimental impact of dominant ideologies, of evaluating who is being included in and excluded from the learning process, and paying attention to when teaching fails to consider students’ varying social, psychological, physical and/or emotional needs.

This edited volume brings CIP into the realm of comparative education by gathering scholars from across academic disciplines and countries to explore how these pedagogies not only promote deep learning among students, but also better equip instructors to attend to the needs of diverse students by prioritizing their intellectual and social development; creating identity affirming learning environments that foster high expectations; recognizing the value of the cultural and national differences that learners bring to the educational experience; and engaging the “whole” student in the teaching and learning process.
Trans* In College
Transgender Students' Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion
By Z Nicolazzo · 2016
Stylus
This is both a personal book that offers an account of the author’s own trans* identity and a deeply engaged study of trans* collegians that reveals the complexities of trans* identities, and how these students navigate the trans* oppression present throughout society and their institutions, create community and resilience, and establish meaning and control in a world that assumes binary genders.

This book is addressed as much to trans* students themselves – offering them a frame to understand the genders that mark them as different and to address the feelings brought on by the weight of that difference – as it is to faculty, student affairs professionals, and college administrators, opening up the implications for the classroom and the wider campus.

This book not only remedies the paucity of literature on trans* college students, but does so from a perspective of resiliency and agency. Rather than situating trans* students as problems requiring accommodation, this book problematizes the college environment and frames trans* students as resilient individuals capable of participating in supportive communities and kinship networks, and of developing strategies to promote their own success.

Z Nicolazzo provides the reader with a nuanced and illuminating review of the literature on gender and sexuality that sheds light on the multiplicity of potential expressions and outward representations of trans* identity as a prelude to the ethnography ze conducted with nine trans* collegians that richly documents their interactions with, and responses to, environments ranging from the unwittingly offensive to explicitly antagonistic.

The book concludes by giving space to the study’s participants to themselves share what they want college faculty, staff, and students to know about their lived experiences. Two appendices respectively provide a glossary of vocabulary and terms to address commonly asked questions, and a description of the study design, offered as guide for others considering working alongside marginalized population in a manner that foregrounds ethics, care, and reciprocity.
The ABCs of How We Learn
26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them
By Daniel L. Schwartz, Jessica M. Tsang, and Kristen P. Blair · 2016
Norton
An explosive growth in research on how people learn has revealed many ways to improve teaching and catalyze learning at all ages. The purpose of this book is to present this new science of learning so that educators can creatively translate the science into exceptional practice. The book is highly appropriate for the preparation and professional development of teachers and college faculty, but also parents, trainers, instructional designers, psychology students, and simply curious folks interested in improving their own learning.

Based on a popular Stanford University course, The ABCs of How We Learn uses a novel format that is suitable as both a textbook and a popular read. With everyday language, engaging examples, a sense of humor, and solid evidence, it describes 26 unique ways that students learn.

Each chapter offers a concise and approachable breakdown of one way people learn, how it works, how we know it works, how and when to use it, and what mistakes to avoid. The book presents learning research in a way that educators can creatively translate into exceptional lessons and classroom practice.

The book covers field-defining learning theories ranging from behaviorism (R is for Reward) to cognitive psychology (S is for Self-Explanation) to social psychology (O is for Observation). The chapters also introduce lesser-known theories exceptionally relevant to practice, such as arousal theory (X is for eXcitement). Together the theories, evidence, and strategies from each chapter can be combined endlessly to create original and effective learning plans and the means to know if they succeed.
The Spark of Learning
Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion
By Sarah Rose Cavanagh · 2016
West Virginia University Press
Historically we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry, staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The field of education, however, is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning, informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience. In friendly, readable prose, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that if you as an educator want to capture your students' attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. To make this argument, she brings to bear a wide range of evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience, and she provides practical examples of successful classroom activities from a variety of disciplines in secondary and higher education.
Teaching at Its Best
A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 4th edition
By Linda B. Nilson · 2016
Jossey-Bass
Teaching at Its Best is the bestselling, research-based toolbox for college instructors at any level, in any higher education setting. Packed with practical guidance, proven techniques, and expert perspectives, this book helps instructors improve student learning both face-to-face and online. This new fourth edition features five new chapters on building critical thinking into course design, creating a welcoming classroom environment, helping students learn how to learn, giving and receiving feedback, and teaching in multiple modes, along with the latest research and new questions to facilitate faculty discussion. Topics include new coverage of the flipped classroom, cutting-edge technologies, self-regulated learning, the mental processes involved in learning and memory, and more, in the accessible format and easy-to-understand style that has made this book a much-valued resource among college faculty.

Good instructors are always looking for ways to improve student learning. With college classrooms becoming increasingly varied by age, ability, and experience, the need for fresh ideas and techniques has never been greater. This book provides a wealth of research-backed practices that apply across the board.
  • Teach students practical, real-world problem solving
  • Interpret student ratings accurately
  • Boost motivation and help students understand how they learn
  • Explore alternative techniques, formats, activities, and exercises
Given the ever-growing body of research on student learning, faculty now have many more choices of effective teaching strategies than they used to have, along with many more ways to achieve excellence in the classroom. Teaching at Its Best is an invaluable toolbox for refreshing your approach, and providing the exceptional education your students deserve.
Minds Online
Teaching Effectively with Technology
By Michelle D. Miller · 2016
Harvard University Press
From wired campuses to smart classrooms to massive open online courses (MOOCs), digital technology is now firmly embedded in higher education. But the dizzying pace of innovation, combined with a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of new tools and programs, challenges educators to articulate how technology can best fit into the learning experience. Minds Online is a concise, nontechnical guide for academic leaders and instructors who seek to advance learning in this changing environment, through a sound scientific understanding of how the human brain assimilates knowledge.

Drawing on the latest findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller explores how attention, memory, and higher thought processes such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. The techniques she describes promote retention of course material through frequent low‐stakes testing and practice, and help prevent counterproductive cramming by encouraging better spacing of study. Online activities also help students become more adept with cognitive aids, such as analogies, that allow them to apply learning across situations and disciplines. Miller guides instructors through the process of creating a syllabus for a cognitively optimized, fully online course. She presents innovative ideas for how to use multimedia effectively, how to take advantage of learners’ existing knowledge, and how to motivate students to do their best work and complete the course.

For a generation born into the Internet age, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning.
Four-Dimensional Education
The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed
By Charles Fadel · 2015
Center for Curriculum Redesign
“A very thoughtful treatment of the competencies our students need to thrive in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world. This book will help educators understand and navigate the critical choices we are facing.”
–Carol Dweck,
Lewis & Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology
Stanford University

“The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-Dimensional Education provides a clear and actionable first-of-its-kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century. Its main innovation lies in not presenting yet another one-size-fits-all list of what individuals should learn, but in crisply defining the spaces in which educators, curriculum planners, policymakers and learners can establish what should be learned, in their context and for their future.”
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills,
OECD.
Universal Design in Higher Education
From Principles to Practice, 2nd edition
By Sheryl E. Burgstahler · 2015
Harvard Education Press
This edition is a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute guide for creating fully accessible college and university programs. It has been thoroughly revised and expanded, and it addresses major recent changes in universities and colleges, the law, and technology.

As larger numbers of people with disabilities attend postsecondary educational institutions, there have been comparable greater efforts to make the full array of classes, services, and programs accessible to all students. This revised edition provides both a full survey of those measures and practical guidance for schools as they work to turn the goal of universal accessibility into a reality. As such, it makes an indispensable contribution to the growing body of literature on special education and universal design.
Teaching Undergraduate Science
A Guide to Overcoming Obstacles to Student Learning
By Linda C. Hodges · 2015
Stylus
This book is written for all science or engineering faculty who have ever found themselves baffled and frustrated by their undergraduate students’ lack of engagement and learning. The author, an experienced scientist, faculty member, and educational consultant, addresses these issues with the knowledge of faculty interests, constraints, and day-to-day concerns in mind. Drawing from the research on learning, she offers faculty new ways to think about the struggles their science students face. She then provides a range of evidence-based teaching strategies that can make the time faculty spend in the classroom more productive and satisfying.

Linda Hodges reviews the various learning problems endemic to teaching science, explains why they are so common and persistent, and presents a digest of key ideas and strategies to address them, based on the research she has undertaken into the literature on the cognitive sciences and education.

Recognizing that faculty have different views about teaching, different comfort levels with alternative teaching approaches, and are often pressed for time, Linda Hodges takes these constraints into account by first offering a framework for thinking purposefully about course design and teaching choices, and then providing a range of strategies to address very specific teaching barriers – whether it be students’ motivation, engagement in class, ability to problem solve, their reading comprehension, or laboratory, research or writing skills.

Except for the first and last chapters, the other chapters in this book stand on their own (i.e., can be read in any order) and address a specific challenge students have in learning and doing science. Each chapter summarizes the research explaining why students struggle and concludes by offering several teaching options categorized by how easy or difficult they are to implement. Some, for example, can work in a large lecture class without a great expenditure of time; others may require more preparation and a more adventurous approach to teaching. Each strategy is accompanied by a table categorizing its likely impact, how much time it will take in class or out, and how difficult it will be to implement.

Like scientific research, teaching works best when faculty start with a goal in mind, plan an approach building on the literature, use well-tested methodologies, and analyze results for future trials. Linda Hodges’ message is that with such intentional thought and a bit of effort faculty can succeed in helping many more students gain exciting new skills and abilities, whether those students are potential scientists or physicians or entrepreneurs. Her book serves as a mini compendium of current research as well as a protocol manual: a readily accessible guide to the literature, the best practices known to date, and a framework for thinking about teaching.
Discussion in the College Classroom
Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online
By Jay R. Howard · 2015
Jossey-Bass
Second only to lecture as the most widely used instructional strategy, there's no better method than classroom discussion to actively engage students with course material. Most faculty are not aware that there is an extensive body of research on the topic from which instructors can learn to facilitate exceptional classroom discussion. Discussion in the College Classroom is a practical guide which utilizes that research, frames it sociologically, and offers advice, along with a wide variety of strategies, to help you spark a relevant conversation and steer it toward specific learning goals.

Applicable across a spectrum of academic disciplines both online and on campus, these ideas will help you overcome the practical challenges and norms that can undermine discussion, and foster a new atmosphere of collaborative learning and critical thinking. Higher education faculty are increasingly expected to be more intentional and reflective in their pedagogical practice, and this guide shows you how to meet those expectations, improve student outcomes, and tackle the perennial problem of lagging engagement.

Thoroughly grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning, this book gives you concrete guidance on integrating discussion into your courses. You'll learn to:
  • Overcome the challenges that inhibit effective discussion
  • Develop classroom norms that facilitate discussion
  • Keep discussion focused, relevant, and productive
  • Maximize the utility of online student discussions
The kind of discussion that improves learning rarely arises spontaneously. Like any pedagogical technique, careful planning and smart strategy are the keys to keeping students focused, engaged, and invested in the conversation. Discussion in the College Classroom helps you keep the discussion applicable to the material at hand while serving learning goals.
A Concise Guide to Improving Student Learning
Six Evidence-Based Principles and How to Apply Them
By Diane Cummings Persellin and Mary Blythe Daniels · 2015
Stylus
This concise guidebook is intended for faculty who are interested in engaging their students and developing deep and lasting learning, but do not have the time to immerse themselves in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Acknowledging the growing body of peer-reviewed literature on practices that can dramatically impact teaching, this intentionally brief book:
  • Summarizes recent research on six of the most compelling principles in learning and teaching
  • Describes their application to the college classroom
  • Presents teaching strategies that are based on pragmatic practices
  • Provides annotated bibliographies and important citations for faculty who want to explore these topics further
This guidebook begins with an overview of how we learn, covering such topics such as the distinction between expert and novice learners, memory, prior learning, and metacognition. The body of the book is divided into three main sections each of which includes teaching principles, applications, and related strategies – most of which can be implemented without extensive preparation.

The applications sections present examples of practice across a diverse range of disciplines including the sciences, humanities, arts, and pre-professional programs.
Clickers in the Classroom
Using Classroom Response Systems to Increase Student Learning
By David S. Goldstein and Peter D. Wallis · 2015
Stylus
With classroom response systems (or CRSs, also known as Student Response Systems, Individual Response Systems, or, informally, “clickers”) in use in higher education for some 20 years, there is now both ample research and a wealth of examples and ideas to draw on for faculty who are contemplating their use, or exploring new ways to integrate them in their teaching.

The research demonstrates that, integrated purposefully in courses, the use of clickers aligns with what neuroscience tells us about the formation of memory and the development of learning. In addition, they elicit contributions from otherwise reticent students and enhance collaboration, even in large lecture courses; foster more honest responses to discussion prompts; increase students’ engagement and satisfaction with the classroom environment; and provide an instantaneous method of formative assessment.

This book presents a brief history of the development of CRSs and a survey of empirical research to provide a context for current best practices, and then presents seven chapters providing authentic, effective examples of the use of clickers across a wide range of academic disciplines, demonstrating how they can be effective in helping students to recognize their misconceptions and grasp fundamental concepts.

Like all pedagogical interventions, classroom response systems are no panacea, and the experienced contributors candidly describe avoidable pitfalls while demonstrating how clickers can deepen student learning and how, by providing instantaneous feedback, they enable teachers to make adjustments on the fly to better address student understandings or misunderstandings.

The final chapter explores pros and cons of response systems that use mobile devices and smart phones, and the book concludes with an annotated list of further resources, such as books, articles, and videos.
Teaching for Learning
101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success
By Claire Howell Major, Michael S. Harris, and Todd D. Zakrajsek · 2015
Routledge
Despite a growing body of research on teaching methods, instructors lack a comprehensive resource that highlights and synthesizes proven approaches. Teaching for Learning fills that gap. Each of the one hundred and one entries:
  • describes an approach and lists its essential features and elements
  • demonstrates how that approach has been used in education, including specific examples from different disciplines
  • reviews findings from the research literature
  • describes techniques to improve effectiveness.
Teaching for Learning provides instructors with a resource grounded in the academic knowledge base, written in an easily accessible, engaging, and practical style.
Teaching Online
A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice
By Claire Howell Major · 2015
Johns Hopkins University Press
It is difficult to imagine a college class today that does not include some online component—whether a simple posting of a syllabus to course management software, the use of social media for communication, or a full-blown course offering through a MOOC platform. In Teaching Online, Claire Howell Major describes for college faculty the changes that accompany use of such technologies and offers real-world strategies for surmounting digital teaching challenges.

Teaching with these evolving media requires instructors to alter the ways in which they conceive of and do their work, according to Major. They must frequently update their knowledge of learning, teaching, and media, and they need to develop new forms of instruction, revise and reconceptualize classroom materials, and refresh their communication patterns. Faculty teaching online must also reconsider the student experience and determine what changes for students ultimately mean for their own work and for their institutions.

Teaching Online presents instructors with a thoughtful synthesis of educational theory, research, and practice as well as a review of strategies for managing the instructional changes involved in teaching online. In addition, this book presents examples of best practices from successful online instructors as well as cutting-edge ideas from leading scholars and educational technologists. Faculty members, researchers, instructional designers, students, administrators, and policy makers who engage with online learning will find this book an invaluable resource.
Teach Students How to Learn
Strategies You Can Incorporate into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation
By Saundra Yancy McGuire and Stephanie McGuire · 2015
Stylus
What is preventing your students from performing according to expectations? Saundra McGuire offers a simple but profound answer: If you teach students how to learn and give them simple, straightforward strategies to use, they can significantly increase their learning and performance.

For over a decade Saundra McGuire has been acclaimed for her presentations and workshops on metacognition and student learning because the tools and strategies she shares have enabled faculty to facilitate dramatic improvements in student learning and success. This book encapsulates the model and ideas she has developed in the past fifteen years, ideas that are being adopted by an increasing number of faculty with considerable effect.

The methods she proposes do not require restructuring courses or an inordinate amount of time to teach. They can often be accomplished in a single session, transforming students from memorizers and regurgitators to students who begin to think critically and take responsibility for their own learning.

Saundra McGuire takes the reader sequentially through the ideas and strategies that students need to understand and implement. First, she demonstrates how introducing students to metacognition and Bloom’s Taxonomy reveals to them the importance of understanding how they learn and provides the lens through which they can view learning activities and measure their intellectual growth. Next, she presents a specific study system that can quickly empower students to maximize their learning. Then, she addresses the importance of dealing with emotion, attitudes, and motivation by suggesting ways to change students’ mindsets about ability and by providing a range of strategies to boost motivation and learning; finally, she offers guidance to faculty on partnering with campus learning centers.

She pays particular attention to academically unprepared students, noting that the strategies she offers for this particular population are equally beneficial for all students.
Learning Assessment Techniques
A Handbook for College Faculty
By Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major · 2015
Jossey-Bass
Learning Assessment Techniques provides 50 easy-to-implement active learning techniques that gauge student learning across academic disciplines and learning environments. Using Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning as its organizational framework, it embeds assessment within active learning activities.

Each technique features: purpose and use, key learning goals, step-by-step implementation, online adaptation, analysis and reporting, concrete examples in both on-site and online environments, and key references—all in an easy-to-follow format. The book includes an all-new Learning Goals Inventory, as well as more than 35 customizable assessment rubrics, to help teachers determine significant learning goals and appropriate techniques. Readers will also gain access to downloadable supplements, including a worksheet to guide teachers through the six steps of the Learning Assessment Techniques planning and implementation cycle.

College teachers today are under increased pressure to teach effectively and provide evidence of what, and how well, students are learning. An invaluable asset for college teachers of any subject, Learning Assessment Techniques provides a practical framework for seamlessly integrating teaching, learning, and assessment.
Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy
Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation
By Laura I. Rendón · 2014
Stylus
The motivation for the quest that Laura Rendón shares in this book was the realization that she, along with many educators, had lost sight of the deeper, relationship-centered essence of education, and lost touch with the fine balance between educating for academics and educating for life.

Her purpose is to reconnect readers with the original impulse that led them to become educators; and to help them rediscover, with her, their passion for teaching and learning in the service of others and for the well being of our society.

She offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing. In the process she develops a pedagogy that encompasses wholeness, multiculturalism, and contemplative practice, that helps students transcend limiting views about themselves; fosters high expectations, and helps students to become social change agents.

She invites the reader to share her journey in developing sentipensante pedagogy, and to challenge seven entrenched agreements about education that act against wholeness and the appreciation of truth in all forms. She offers examples of her own teaching and of the classroom practices of faculty she encountered along the way; as well as guidance on the challenges, rewards and responsibilities that anyone embarking on creating a new vision of teaching and learning should attend to.
Mental Health Issues and the University Student
By Doris Iarovici · 2014
Johns Hopkins University Press
Young adults enter college with many challenges—complicated family dynamics, identity issues, and extreme pressure to succeed, among others. Students may also have mental health difficulties, ranging from adjustment disorders to mood disorders, and growing numbers of them are seeking help on campus.

But these students are also resilient and eager to learn, stepping onto campus with hope for a new and better phase of life. Doris Iarovici, a psychiatrist at Duke University Counseling and Psychological Services, sees in college and university mental health services an opportunity for mental health professionals to bring about positive change with young people during a crucial period of their development.

Dr. Iarovici describes the current college mental health crisis and narrates how college mental health services have evolved along with changes in student populations. She discusses students’ lifestyle problems and psychiatric concerns, using case vignettes to explore a variety of interventions. Included are discussions of substance abuse, relationship difficulties, eating disorders, depression and anxiety, and culture clashes. Problems uniquely addressed in this book include sleep disturbances and perfectionism. An essential component of the volume is a guide to making emergency assessments, from risk classification and hospitalization to public safety and communication within and outside the campus community.
Guide to Teaching Effective Seminars
Conversation, Identity, and Power
By Susan R. Fiksdal · 2014
Routledge
A Guide to Teaching Effective Seminars provides college and university faculty with a new approach to thinking about their teaching and helps them develop a deeper understanding of conversation itself. Seminars often inspire collaborative learning and produce rich educational environments, yet even experienced faculty find these conversations can range in quality. A Guide to Teaching Effective Seminars addresses this challenge by presenting a sociolinguistic perspective on seminars and providing instructors with best practices to manage successful seminars. Grounded in research, data, and her own deep experience teaching seminars, author Susan Fiksdal reveals ways students negotiate perspectives on reading, on conversation, and on social identities and power. By giving readers an appreciation of the discourse of seminars, the book helps to undermine stereotypes about language and people, increase civility, reduce misunderstandings, and foster tolerance for new ideas and diverse ways of expressing them. This important resource is for faculty members at all levels of experience and in every discipline who want practical advice about facilitating effective seminars.
Interactive Open Educational Resources
A Guide to Finding, Choosing, and Using What's Out There to Transform College Teaching
By John D. Shank · 2014
Jossey-Bass
This book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor’s curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution’s learning management system.
Make It Stick
The Science of Successful Learning
By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel · 2014
Harvard University Press
To most of us, learning something “the hard way” implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.

Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.

Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
Collaborative Learning Techniques
A Handbook for College Faculty, 2nd edition
By Elizabeth F. Barkley, Claire Howell Major, and K. Patricia Cross · 2014
Jossey-Bass
A mountain of evidence shows that students who learn in small groups together exhibit higher academic achievement, motivation, and satisfaction than those who don't. Collaborative learning puts into practice the major conclusion from learning theory: that students must be actively engaged in building their own minds. In this book, the authors synthesize the relevant research and theory to support thirty-five collaborative learning activities for use in both traditional and online classrooms.

This second edition reflects the changed world of higher education. New technologies have opened up endless possibilities for college teaching, but it's not always easy to use these technologies effectively. Updated to address the challenges of today's new teaching environments, including online, "flipped," and large lectures, Collaborative Learning Techniques is a wonderful reference for educators who want to make the most of any course environment. This revised and expanded edition includes:
  • Additional techniques, with an all-new chapter on using games to provide exciting, current, technologically-sophisticated curricula
  • A section on effective online implementation for each of the thirty-five techniques
  • Significantly expanded pedagogical rationale and updates on the latest research showing how and why collaborative learning works
  • Examples for implementing collaborative learning techniques in a variety of learning environments, including large lecture classes and "flipped" classes
  • Expanded guidance on how to solve common problems associated with group work
The authors guide instructors through all aspects of group work, providing a solid grounding in what to do, how to do it, and why it is important for student learning. The detailed procedures in Collaborative Learning Techniques will help teachers make sure group activities go smoothly, no matter the size or delivery method of their classes. With practical advice on how to form student groups, assign roles, build team spirit, address unexpected problems, and evaluate and grade student participation, this new edition of the international classic makes incorporating effective group work easy.
Creating Self-Regulated Learners
Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills
By Linda B. Nilson · 2013
Stylus
Most of our students neither know how learning works nor what they have to do to ensure it, to the detriment both of their studies and their development as lifelong learners.

The point of departure for this book is the literature on self-regulated learning that tells us that deep, lasting, independent learning requires learners to bring into play a range of cognitive skills, affective attitudes, and even physical activities – about which most students are wholly unaware; and that self-regulation, which has little to do with measured intelligence, can be developed by just about anyone and is a fundamental prerequisite of academic success.

Linda Nilson provides the theoretical background to student self-regulation, the evidence that it enhances achievement, and the strategies to help students develop it. She presents an array of tested activities and assignments through which students can progressively reflect on, monitor and improve their learning skills; describes how they can be integrated with different course components and on various schedules; and elucidates how to intentionally and seamlessly incorporate them into course design to effectively meet disciplinary and student development objectives. Recognizing that most faculty are unfamiliar with these strategies, she also recommends how to prepare for introducing them into the classroom and adding more as instructors become more confident using them.

The book concludes with descriptions of courses from different fields to offer models and ideas for implementation.

At a time of so much concern about what our students are learning in college and how well prepared they are for the challenges of tomorrow’s economy and society, self-regulated learning provides a reassuring solution, particularly as studies indicate that struggling students benefit the most from practicing it.
Quiet
The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Speaking
By Susan Cain · 2013
Crown
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, impeccably researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.
Contemplative Practices in Higher Education
Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning
By Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush · 2013
Jossey-Bass
Contemplative pedagogy is a way for instructors to:
  • Empower students to integrate their own experience into the theoretical material they are being taught in order to deepen their understanding
  • Help students to develop sophisticated problem-solving skills
  • Support students’ sense of connection to and compassion for others
  • Engender inquiries into students’ most profound questions
Contemplative practices are used in just about every discipline—from physics to economics to history—and are found in every type of institution. Each year more and more faculty, education reformers, and leaders of teaching and learning centers seek out best practices in contemplative teaching, and now can find them here, brought to you by two of the foremost leaders and innovators on the subject.

This book presents background information and ideas for the practical application of contemplative practices across the academic curriculum from the physical sciences to the humanities and arts. Examples of contemplative techniques included in the book are mindfulness, meditation, yoga, deep listening, contemplative reading and writing, and pilgrimage, including site visits and field trips.
Constructivism
Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, Second Edition
By Catherine Twomey Fosnot · 2013
Teachers College Press
This enduring bestseller presents a comprehensive examination of constructivism and its relationship to teaching and learning. Closing the gap between theory and practice, well-known scholars make constructivism accessible by showing its application in everyday classrooms. Building on the success of the first edition, the authors have completely updated this popular text and expanded its scope to include examples of constructivist teaching across all grade levels and disciplines.
Learner-Centered Teaching
Five Key Changes to Practice, 2nd edition
By Maryellen Weimer · 2013
Jossey-Bass
Maryellen Weimer—one of the nation's most highly regarded authorities on effective college teaching—offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic of learner-centered teaching in the college and university classroom. This edition includes examples of practice in action from a variety of disciplines and contains new information on the research support for learner-centered approaches. Weimer also includes a more in-depth discussion of how students' developmental issues influence the effectiveness of learner- centered teaching.

Learner-centered teaching focuses attention on what the student is learning, how the student is learning, the conditions under which the student is learning, whether the student is retaining and applying the learning, and how current learning positions the student for future learning. To help educators accomplish the goals of learner-centered teaching, this important book presents the meaning, practice, and ramifications of the learner-centered approach and how this approach transforms the college classroom environment. Learner-Centered Teaching shows how to tie teaching and curriculum to the process and objectives of learning rather than to the content delivery alone.

The book also offers well-researched advice for educators who want to transition to a learner-centered approach in their classrooms and identifies the steps to take to put into place learner-centered policies and practices. Learner-Centered Teaching provides a theoretical foundation for the learner-centered approach and outlines a positive way to improve teaching.
Making Scientists
Six Principles for Effective College Teaching
By Gregory Light and Marina Micari · 2013
Harvard University Press
For many college students, studying the hard sciences seems out of the question. Students and professors alike collude in the prejudice that physics and molecular biology, mathematics and engineering are elite disciplines restricted to a small number with innate talent. Gregory Light and Marina Micari reject this bias, arguing, based on their own transformative experiences, that environment is just as critical to academic success in the sciences as individual ability. Making Scientists lays the groundwork for a new paradigm of how scientific subjects can be taught at the college level, and how we can better cultivate scientists, engineers, and other STEM professionals.

The authors invite us into Northwestern University’s Gateway Science Workshop, where the seminar room is infused with a sense of discovery usually confined to the research lab. Conventional science instruction demands memorization of facts and formulas but provides scant opportunity for critical reflection and experimental conversation. Light and Micari stress conceptual engagement with ideas, practical problem-solving, peer mentoring, and—perhaps most important—initiation into a culture of cooperation, where students are encouraged to channel their energy into collaborative learning rather than competition with classmates. They illustrate the tangible benefits of treating students as apprentices—talented young people taking on the mental habits, perspectives, and wisdom of the scientific community, while contributing directly to its development.
Cheating Lessons
Learning from Academic Dishonesty
By James M. Lang · 2013
Harvard University Press
Nearly three-quarters of college students cheat during their undergraduate careers, a startling number attributed variously to the laziness of today’s students, their lack of a moral compass, or the demands of a hypercompetitive society. For James Lang, cultural or sociological explanations like these are red herrings. His provocative new research indicates that students often cheat because their learning environments give them ample incentives to try—and that strategies which make cheating less worthwhile also improve student learning. Cheating Lessons is a practical guide to tackling academic dishonesty at its roots.

Drawing on an array of findings from cognitive theory, Lang analyzes the specific, often hidden features of course design and daily classroom practice that create opportunities for cheating. Courses that set the stakes of performance very high, that rely on single assessment mechanisms like multiple-choice tests, that have arbitrary grading criteria: these are the kinds of conditions that breed cheating. Lang seeks to empower teachers to create more effective learning environments that foster intrinsic motivation, promote mastery, and instill the sense of self-efficacy that students need for deep learning.

Although cheating is a persistent problem, the prognosis is not dire. The good news is that strategies which reduce cheating also improve student performance overall. Instructors who learn to curb academic dishonesty will have done more than solve a course management problem—they will have become better educators all around.
Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning
A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective, and Enjoyable College Teaching
By James R. Davis and Bridget D. Arend · 2013
Stylus
For teachers in higher education who haven’t been able to catch up with developments in teaching and learning, James Davis and Bridget Arend offer an introduction that focuses on seven coherent and proven evidence-based strategies. The authors provide the reader with a conceptual approach for selecting appropriate teaching strategies for different types of content, and for achieving specific learning objectives. They demonstrate through examples how a focused and purposeful selection of activities improves student performance, and in the process makes for a more effective and satisfying teaching experience.

The core of the book presents a chapter on each of the seven ways of learning. Each chapter offers a full description of the process, illustrates its application with examples from different academic fields and types of institutions, clearly describes the teacher’s facilitation role, and covers assessment and online use.

The seven ways of learning are: Behavioral Learning; Cognitive Learning; Learning through Inquiry; Learning with Mental Models; Learning through Groups and Teams; Learning through Virtual Realities; and Experiential Learning.

This is the ideal companion for teachers who are beginning to explore new ways of teaching, and want to do some serious independent thinking about learning. The book can also be used to prepare graduate students for teaching, and will be welcomed by centers for teaching and learning to help continuing faculty re-examine a particular aspect of their teaching.
Creating Significant Learning Experiences
An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, Revised edition
By L. Dee Fink · 2013
Jossey-Bass
Since the original publication of L. Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences, higher education has continued to move in two opposite directions: more institutions encourage faculty to focus on research, obtaining grants, and publishing, while accreditation agencies, policy-makers, and students themselves emphasize the need for greater attention to the quality of teaching and learning.

Now the author has updated his bestselling classic, providing busy faculty with invaluable conceptual and procedural tools for instructional design. Step by step, Fink shows how to use a taxonomy of significant learning and systematically combine the best research-based practices for learning-centered teaching with a teaching strategy in a way that results in powerful learning experiences.

This edition addresses new research on how people learn, active learning, and student engagement; includes illustrative examples from online teaching; and reports on the effectiveness of Fink's time-tested model. Fink also explores recent changes in higher education nationally and internationally and offers more proven strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching.

Tapping into the knowledge, tools, and strategies in Creating Significant Learning Experiences empowers educators to creatively design courses that will result in significant learning for their students.
Exploring More Signature Pedagogies
Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind
By Nancy L. Chick, Aeron Haynie, and Regan A. R. Gurung · 2012
Stylus
What is distinctive about the ways specific disciplines are traditionally taught, and what kinds of learning do they promote? Do they inspire the habits of the discipline itself, or do they inadvertently contradict or ignore those disciplines? By analyzing assumptions about often unexamined teaching practices, their history, and relevance in contemporary learning contexts, this book offers teachers a fresh way to both think about their impact on students and explore more effective ways to engage students in authentic habits and practices.

This companion volume to Exploring Signature Pedagogies covers disciplines not addressed in the earlier volume and further expands the scope of inquiry by interrogating the teaching methods in interdisciplinary fields and a number of professions, critically returning to Lee S. Shulman’s origins of the concept of signature pedagogies. This volume also differs from the first by including authors from across the United States, as well as Ireland and Australia.

The first section examines the signature pedagogies in the humanities and fine arts fields of philosophy, foreign language instruction, communication, art and design, and arts entrepreneurship. The second section describes signature pedagogies in the social and natural sciences: political science, economics, and chemistry. Section three highlights the interdisciplinary fields of Ignatian pedagogy, women’s studies, and disability studies; and the book concludes with four chapters on professional pedagogies – nursing, occupational therapy, social work, and teacher education – that illustrate how these pedagogies change as the social context changes, as their knowledge base expands, or as online delivery of instruction increases.
Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
A Guide to the Process, and How to Develop a Project from Start to Finish
By Cathy Bishop-Clark and Beth Dietz-Uhler · 2012
Stylus
This is a book for anyone who has ever considered engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning – known familiarly as SoTL – and needs a better understanding of what it is, and how to engage in it. The authors describe how to create a SoTL project, its implications for promotion and tenure, and how it fosters:
  • Increased satisfaction and fulfillment in teaching
  • Improved student learning
  • Increased productivity of scholarly publication
  • Collaboration with colleagues across disciplines
  • Contributing to a growing and important body of literature
This guide provides prospective SoTL scholars with the necessary background information, foundational theory, tools, resources, and methodology to develop their own SoTL projects, taking the reader through the five stages of the process: Generating a research question; Designing the study; Collecting the data; Analyzing the data; and Presenting and publishing your SoTL project. Each stage is illustrated by examples of actual SoTL studies, and is accompanied by worksheets to help the reader refine ideas and map out his or her next steps. The process and worksheets are the fruit of the successful SoTL workshops the authors have offered at their institution for many years.

SoTL differs from scholarly and reflective teaching in that it not only involves questioning one’s teaching or a teaching strategy, but also formally gathering and exploring evidence, researching the literature, refining and testing practices, and finally going public. The purpose of SoTL is not just to make an impact on student learning, but through formal, peer-reviewed communication, to contribute to the larger knowledge base on teaching and learning.
What the Best College Students Do
By Ken Bain · 2012
Harvard University Press
Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.
Teaching What You Don’t Know
By Therese Huston · 2012
Harvard University Press
Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you’re lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You’ve taught Kant for twenty years, but now you’re team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn’t replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the “Sexual Identity” course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don’t know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don’t share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.

In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don’t have a clue how to answer a question?

Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn’t come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students’ understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and—yes—for dealing with those impossible questions.

Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don’t know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It’s an adventure.
Introduction to Rubrics
An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning
By Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi · 2012
Stylus
Research shows that rubrics save professors’ time while conveying meaningful and timely feedback for students, and promoting self-regulated and independent learning. The reason rubrics are little used in higher education is that few faculty members have been exposed to their use.

At its most basic a rubric is a scoring tool that divides an assignment into its component parts and objectives, and provides a detailed description of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable levels of performance for each part.

Rubrics can be used to grade any assignment or task: research papers, book reviews, participation in discussions, laboratory work, portfolios, oral presentations, group work, and more.

This book defines what rubrics are, and how to construct and use them. It provides a complete introduction for anyone starting out to integrate rubrics in their teaching.
Cheating in College
Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It
By Donald L. McCabe, Kenneth D. Butterfield, and Linda K. Treviño · 2012
Johns Hopkins University Press
With academic dishonesty on the rise, this book explains why students cheat, how to foster integrity, and why it matters.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, and the college years are a critical period for their development of ethical standards. Cheating in College explores how and why students cheat and what policies, practices, and participation may be useful in promoting academic integrity and reducing cheating.

The authors investigate trends over time, including internet-based cheating. They consider personal and situational explanations, such as the culture of groups in which dishonesty is more common (such as business majors) and social settings that support cheating (such as fraternities and sororities). They also focus on how faculty and administrators are increasing their efforts to promote academic honesty among students. Orientation and training sessions, information on college and university websites, student handbooks that describe codes of conduct, honor codes, and course syllabi all define cheating and establish the consequences.

Based on the authors’ multiyear, multisite surveys, Cheating in College quantifies and analyzes student cheating to demonstrate why academic integrity is important and to describe the cultural efforts that are effective in restoring it.
Teaching Naked
How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
By José Antonio Bowen · 2012
Jossey-Bass
You've heard about "flipping your classroom"—now find out how to do it! Introducing a new way to think about higher education, learning, and technology that prioritizes the benefits of the human dimension. José Bowen recognizes that technology is profoundly changing education and that if students are going to continue to pay enormous sums for campus classes, colleges will need to provide more than what can be found online and maximize "naked" face-to-face contact with faculty. Here, he illustrates how technology is most powerfully used outside the classroom, and, when used effectively, how it can ensure that students arrive to class more prepared for meaningful interaction with faculty. Bowen offers practical advice for faculty and administrators on how to engage students with new technology while restructuring classes into more active learning environments.
Optimizing Teaching and Learning
Practicing Pedagogical Research
By Regan A. R. Gurung and Beth M. Schwartz · 2011
Jossey-Bass
The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is one of the most dynamic areas of research in the field of higher education today in which faculty continuously evaluate the quality of their teaching and its affect on student learning. Faculty are being held accountable for the effectiveness of their teaching and in turn they are starting to engage in SoTL-related intellectual exchanges not only in their research agendas but also in the ways in which they teach their students in the classroom. At the heart of this new movement, there is a simple idea: take a close look at how you teach and how your students learn, use the same methodology that you would use for formal investigations (be it in the humanities or sciences), and hold your research to the same standards most notably peer review.

Optimizing Teaching and Learning will serve as a guide for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and at the same time contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It bridges the gap between the research and practice of SoTL, with explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write-up pedagogical research, including samples of actual questionnaires and other materials (e.g., focus group questions) that will jumpstart investigations into teaching and learning. It also explores the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for both seasoned faculty and new faculty who are just beginning to assess their teaching methods and learn how to think beyond the content.
Whistling Vivaldi
How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
By Claude M. Steele · 2011
Norton
Claude M. Steele offers a vivid first-person account of the research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and reshaping American identities.
Effective Instruction for STEM Disciplines
From Learning Theory to College Teaching
By Edward J. Mastascusa, William J. Snyder, and Brian S. Hoyt · 2011
Jossey-Bass
This groundbreaking book offers information on the most effective ways that students process material, store it in their long-term memories, and how that effects learning for long-term retention. It reveals how achieving different levels is important for "transfer" which refers to the learner's ability to use what is learned in different situations and to problems that might not be directly related to the problems used to help the student learn. Filled with proven tools, techniques, and approaches, this book explores how to apply these approaches to improve teaching.
The College Fear Factor
How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another
By Rebecca D. Cox · 2011
Harvard University Press
They’re not the students strolling across the bucolic liberal arts campuses where their grandfathers played football. They are first-generation college students—children of immigrants and blue-collar workers—who know that their hopes for success hinge on a degree.

But college is expensive, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Inexperienced students expect tough classes and demanding, remote faculty. They may not know what an assignment means, what a score indicates, or that a single grade is not a definitive measure of ability. And they certainly don’t feel entitled to be there. They do not presume success, and if they have a problem, they don’t expect to receive help or even a second chance.

Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges. She shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Most memorably, she describes how easily students can feel defeated—by their real-world responsibilities and by the demands of college—and come to conclude that they just don’t belong there after all.

Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students’ success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.
Effective Grading
A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College, 2nd edition
By Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson · 2011
Jossey-Bass
The second edition of Effective Grading—the book that has become a classic in the field—provides a proven hands-on guide for evaluating student work and offers an in-depth examination of the link between teaching and grading. Authors Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson explain that grades are not isolated artifacts but part of a process that, when integrated with course objectives, provides rich information about student learning, as well as being a tool for learning itself. The authors show how the grading process can be used for broader assessment objectives, such as curriculum and institutional assessment.

This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes a wealth of new material including:
  • Expanded integration of the use of technology and online teaching

  • A sample syllabus with goals, outcomes, and criteria for student work
  • New developments in assessment for grant-funded projects
  • Additional information on grading group work, portfolios, and service-learning experiences
  • New strategies for aligning tests and assignments with learning goals
  • Current thought on assessment in departments and general education, using classroom work for program assessments, and using assessment data systematically to "close the loop"
  • Material on using the best of classroom assessment to foster institutional assessment
  • New case examples from colleges and universities, including community colleges
Assessment Clear and Simple
A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education, 2nd edition
By Barbara E. Walvoord · 2010
Jossey-Bass
The first edition of Assessment Clear and Simple quickly became the essential go-to guide for anyone who participates in the assessment process in higher education. With the increased pressure to perform assessment to demonstrate accountability, Assessment Clear and Simple is needed more than ever. This second edition of the classic resource offers a concise, step-by-step guide that helps make assessment simple, cost-efficient, and useful to an institution. It contains effective strategies for meeting the requirements of accreditation agencies, legislatures, review boards, and others, while emphasizing and showing how to move from data to actions that improve student learning. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes many new or expanded features, including:
  • Illustrative examples drawn from the author's experience consulting with more than 350 institutions
  • A basic, no-frills assessment plan for departments and for general education
  • Tips on how to integrate portfolios and e-portfolios into the assessment process
  • Suggestions for using rubrics and alternatives to rubrics, including doing assessment for multidisciplinary work
  • Clear instructions on how to construct a coherent institution-wide assessment system and explain it to accreditors
  • Ideas for assigning responsibility for general education assessment
  • Strategies for gathering information about departmental assessment while keeping the departmental workload manageable
  • Information on how to manage assessment in times of budgetary cutbacks
How Learning Works
Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching
By Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman · 2010
Jossey-Bass
Any conversation about effective teaching must begin with a consideration of how students learn. However, instructors may find a gap between resources that focus on the technical research on learning and those that provide practical classroom strategies. How Learning Works provides the bridge for such a gap.

In this volume, the authors introduce seven general principles of learning, distilled from the research literature as well as from twenty-seven years of experience working one-on-one with college faculty. They have drawn on research from a breadth of perspectives (cognitive, developmental, and social psychology; educational research; anthropology; demographics; and organizational behavior) to identify a set of key principles underlying learning-from how effective organization enhances retrieval and use of information to what impacts motivation. These principles provide instructors with an understanding of student learning that can help them see why certain teaching approaches are or are not supporting student learning, generate or refine teaching approaches and strategies that more effectively foster student learning in specific contexts, and transfer and apply these principles to new courses.

For anyone who wants to improve their students' learning, it is crucial to understand how that learning works and how to best foster it. This vital resource is grounded in learning theory and based on research evidence, while being easy to understand and apply to college teaching.
Journal Keeping
How to Use Reflective Journals for Effective Teaching and Learning, Professional Insight, and Positive Change
By Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper · 2009
Stylus
One of the most powerful ways to learn, reflect and make sense of our lives is through journal keeping.

This book presents the potential uses and benefits of journals for personal and professional development—particularly for those in academic life; and demonstrates journals’ potential to foster college students’ learning, fluency and voice, and creative thinking.

In professional life, a journal helps to organize, prioritize and address the many expectations of a faculty member’s or administrator’s roles. Journals are effective for developing time management skills, building problem-solving skills, fostering insight, and decreasing stress.

Both writing and rereading journal entries allow the journal keeper to document thinking; to track changes and review observations; and to examine assumptions and so gain fresh perspectives and insights over past events.

The authors present the background to help readers make an informed decision about the value of journals and to determine whether journals will fit appropriately with their teaching objectives or help manage their personal and professional lives. They offer insights and advice on selecting the format or formats and techniques most appropriate for the reader’s purposes.
Why Don't Students Like School
A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
By Daniel T. Willingham · 2009
Jossey-Bass
Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham focuses his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning. His book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn. It reveals-the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.
  • Nine, easy-to-understand principles with clear applications for the classroom
  • Includes surprising findings, such as that intelligence is malleable, and that you cannot develop "thinking skills" without facts
  • How an understanding of the brain's workings can help teachers hone their teaching skills
Exploring Signature Pedagogies
Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind
By Regan A. R. Gurung, Nancy L. Chick, and Aeron Haynie · 2008
Stylus
How do individual disciplines foster deep learning, and get students to think like disciplinary experts?

With contributions from the sciences, humanities, and the arts, this book critically explores how to best foster student learning within and across the disciplines.

This book represents a major advance in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by moving beyond individual case studies, best practices, and the work of individual scholars, to focus on the unique content and characteristic pedagogies of major disciplines.

Each chapter begins by summarizing the SoTL literature on the pedagogies of a specific discipline, and by examining and analyzing its traditional practices, paying particular attention to how faculty evaluate success. Each concludes by the articulating for its discipline the elements of a “signature pedagogy” that will improve teaching and learning, and by offering an agenda for future research.

Each chapter explores what the pedagogical literature of the discipline suggests are the optimal ways to teach material in that field, and to verify the resulting learning. Each author is concerned about how to engage students in the ways of knowing, the habits of mind, and the values used by experts in their field.
Teaching Unprepared Students
Strategies for Promoting Success and Retention in Higher Education
By Kathleen F. Gabriel · 2008
Stylus
As societal expectations about attending college have grown, professors report increasing numbers of students who are unprepared for the rigors of postsecondary education—not just more students with learning disabilities (whose numbers have more than tripled), but students (with and without special admission status) who are academically at-risk because of inadequate reading, writing and study skills.

This book provides professors and their graduate teaching assistants—those at the front line of interactions with students—with techniques and approaches they can use in class to help at-risk students raise their skills so that they can successfully complete their studies.

The author shares proven practices that will not only engage all students in a class, but also create the conditions—while maintaining high standards and high expectations—to enable at-risk and under-prepared students to develop academically and graduate with good grades. The author also explains how to work effectively with academic support units on campus.

Within the framework of identifying those students who need help, establishing a rapport with them, adopting inclusive teaching strategies, and offering appropriate guidance, the book presents the theory teachers will need, and effective classroom strategies.

The author covers teaching philosophy and goals; issues of discipline and behavior; motivation and making expectations explicit; classroom climate; developing time management and study skills; as well as the application of “universal design” strategies.
Inquiry into the College Classroom
A Journey Toward Scholarly Teaching
By Paul Savory, Amy Nelson Burnett, and Amy Goodburn · 2007
Jossey-Bass
A companion for university faculty interested in conducting scholarly inquiry into their classroom teaching, this practical guide presents a formal model for making visible the careful, difficult, and intentional scholarly work entailed in exploring a teaching question. As a how-to guide, this is an invaluable resource for planning and conducting classroom research—formulating questions and hypotheses, defining a data collection methodology, collecting data, measuring the impact, and documenting the results.

Inquiry Into the College Classroom is filled with illustrative examples that highlight how university faculty from a range of academic disciplines have performed scholarly inquiries into their teaching and leads faculty on a journey that includes:
  • Developing a formal model for structuring the exploration of a classroom inquiry question
  • Providing a practical and useful guide for faculty interested in exploring teaching and learning challenges
  • Detailing faculty experiences in measuring specific changes in student learning or perspectives
  • Demonstrating how to document classroom inquiry in a form to be shared, used, and reviewed by other faculty
  • Sharing useful and practical suggestions for getting started with a classroom inquiry
  • Highlighting different models for disseminating classroom inquiry work
  • Linking classroom inquiry to larger conversations about the scholarship of teaching and learning
Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
The Challenges and Joys of Juggling
By Kathleen McKinney · 2007
Jossey-Bass
This book offers advice on how to do, share, and apply SoTL work to improve student learning and development. Written for college-level faculty members as well as faculty developers, administrators, academic staff, and graduate students, this book will also help undergraduate students collaborating with faculty on SoTL projects. Though targeted at those new to the field of SoTL, more seasoned SoTL researchers and those attempting to support SoTL efforts will find the book valuable. It can be used as an individual reading, a shared reading in SoTL writing circles, a resource in workshops on SoTL, and a text in seminars on teaching. Contents include:
  • Defining SoTL
  • The functions, value, rewards, and standards for SoTL work
  • Working with colleagues, involving students, writing grants, integrating SoTL into your professional life, and finding useful resources
  • Practical and ethical issues associated with SoTL work
  • Making your SoTL public and documenting your work
  • The status of SoTL in disciplinary and institutional contexts
  • Applying the goals of SoTL to enhance student learning and development.
Understanding by Design
2nd edition
By Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe · 2006
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today′s high-stakes, standards-based environment?

Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in Understanding by Design.

The book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning.
Mindset
The New Psychology of Success
By Carol S. Dweck · 2006
Ballantine
After decades of research, Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.
Discussion as a Way of Teaching
Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, 2nd edition
By Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill · 2005
Jossey-Bass
Discussion as a Way of Teaching shows how to plan, conduct, and assess classroom discussions. Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill suggest exercises for starting discussions, strategies for maintaining their momentum, and ways to elicit diverse views and voices. The book also includes new exercises and material on the intersections between discussion and the encouragement of democracy in the classroom. This revised edition contains information on adapting discussion methods in online teaching, on using discussion to enhance democratic participation, and on the theoretical foundations for the discussion exercises described in the book.

Throughout the book, Brookfield and Preskill clearly show how discussion can enliven classrooms, and they outline practical methods for ensuring that students will come to class prepared to discuss a topic. They also explain how to balance the voices of students and teachers, while still preserving the moral, political, and pedagogic integrity of discussion.
What the Best College Teachers Do
By Ken Bain · 2004
Harvard University Press
What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators.

The short answer is—it’s not what teachers do, it’s what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out—but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.

In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.
Teaching Community
A Pedagogy of Hope
By bell hooks · 2003
Routledge
In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning – these values motivate progressive social change.

Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching – so often undervalued in our society – can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."
The Art of Changing the Brain
Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning
By James Zull · 2002
Stylus Publishing
Neuroscience tells us that the products of the mind—thought, emotions, artistic creation—are the result of the interactions of the biological brain with our senses and the physical world: in short, that thinking and learning are the products of a biological process.

This realization, that learning actually alters the brain by changing the number and strength of synapses, offers a powerful foundation for rethinking teaching practice and one's philosophy of teaching.

James Zull invites teachers in higher education or any other setting to accompany him in his exploration of what scientists can tell us about the brain and to discover how this knowledge can influence the practice of teaching. He describes the brain in clear non-technical language and an engaging conversational tone, highlighting its functions and parts and how they interact, and always relating them to the real world of the classroom and his own evolution as a teacher.
The Power of Problem-Based Learning
A Practical "How To" for Teaching Undergraduate Courses in Any Discipline
By Barbara J. Duch, Susan E. Groh, and Deborah E. Allen · 2001
Stylus
Problem-based learning is a powerful classroom process, which uses real world problems to motivate students to identify and apply research concepts and information, work collaboratively and communicate effectively. It is a strategy that promotes life-long habits of learning.

The University of Delaware is recognized internationally as a center of excellence in the use and development of PBL. This book presents the cumulative knowledge and practical experience acquired over nearly a decade of integrating PBL in courses in a wide range of disciplines.

This "how to" book for college and university faculty. It focuses on the practical questions which anyone wishing to embark on PBL will want to know:
  • "Where do I start?"
  • "How do you find problems?"
  • "What do I need to know about managing groups?"
  • "How do you grade in a PBL course?"
The book opens by outlining how the PBL program was developed at the University of Delaware⁠—covering such issues as faculty mentoring and institutional support⁠—to offer a model for implementation for other institutions.

The authors then address the practical questions involved in course transformation and planning for effective problem-based instruction, including writing problems, using the Internet, strategies for using groups, the use of peer tutors and assessment. They conclude with case studies from a variety of disciplines, including biochemistry, pre-law, physics, nursing, chemistry, political science and teacher education.
The Courage to Teach
Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
By Parker J. Palmer · 1998
Jossey-Bass
The Courage to Teach speaks to the joys and pains that teachers of every sort know well. Over the last 20 years, the book has helped countless educators reignite their passion, redirect their practice, and deal with the many pressures that accompany their vital work.

The book builds on a simple premise: good teaching can never be reduced to technique. Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, that core of self where intellect, emotion, and spirit converge—enabling 'live encounters' between teachers, students, and subjects that are the key to deep and lasting learning. Good teachers love learners, learning, and the teaching life in a way that builds trust with students and colleagues, animates their daily practice, and keeps them coming back tomorrow.
  • Reclaim your own vision and purpose against the threat of burn-out
  • Understand why good teaching cannot be reduced to technique alone
  • Explore and practice the relational traits that good teachers have in common
  • Learn how to forge learning connections with your students and "teach across the gap"
Whether used for personal study, book club exploration, or professional development, The Courage to Teach is rich with time-honored wisdom, and contemporary clarity about the ancient arts of teaching and learning.
Teaching to Transgress
Education as the Practice of Freedom
By bell hooks · 1994
Routledge
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks⁠—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual⁠—writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
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Pedagogy Reading List

A community-generated database of resources for college teaching.