Below are texts that faculty members have found particularly helpful in their explorations of teaching and learning, and a website that links to multiple teaching and learning centers. We welcome suggestions for additions to this list.
Ivy Plus Centers for Teaching and Learning
The Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning provides a list of teaching and learning centers around the United States and in the UK at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/resources/ivy.html.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
What makes a great teacher great? 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. 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, Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. (Harvard University Press)
Elizabeth Barkley, K. Patricia Cross, and Claire Howell Major, Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty
Collaborative Learning Techniques is a scholarly and well-written handbook that guides teachers through all aspects of group work, providing solid information on what to do, how to do it, and why it is important to student learning. Synthesizing the relevant research and good practice literature, the authors present detailed procedures for thirty collaborative learning techniques (CoLTs) and offer practical suggestions on a wide range of topics, including how to form groups, assign roles, build team spirit, solve problems, and evaluate and grade student participation. (Jossey-Bass)
John Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom
Engaging Ideas is a practical nuts-and-bolts guide for teachers from any discipline who want to design interest-provoking writing and critical thinking activities and oncorporate them into their courses in a way that encourages inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate. The book also shows how writing can easily be integrated with such other critical thinking activities as inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, interactive lectures, and more—helping transform students from passive to active learners. (Jossey-Bass)
Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Member: Nihil Nimus
As its title suggests (nothing in excess), Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus advocates moderation in ways of working, based on the single-most reliable difference between new faculty who thrive and those who struggle. By following its practical, easy-to-use rules, novice faculty can learn to teach with the highest levels of student approval, involvement, and comprehension, with only modest preparation times and a greater reliance on spontaneity and student participation. Similarly, new faculty can use its rule-based practices to write with ease, increasing productivity, creativity, and publishability through brief, daily sessions of focused and relaxed work. (Allyn and Bacon)
Christopher M. Clark, Talking Shop: Authentic Conversation and Teacher Learning
What do teachers learn from talking to one another about their practice? Talking Shop: Authentic Conversation and Teacher Learning focuses on this important question and presents a case for how the ordinary talk among teachers is a potent medium for teacher training and professional development. Drawing from the work from eight groups of teachers in the United States and Israel who have met in conversation for the past four to five years, the contributors present descriptions of the complexities, obstacles, contradictions, and possibilities that can accompany teacher conversation. Their research findings culminate in a practical model that helps guide educators in developing and supporting their own teacher conversation groups. They show how the development and support model they put forth: is teacher-centered, inexpensive and sustainable; provides frameworks to guide teacher conversations and authentic examples of professional development in action; offers opportunities for faculty and doctoral students to do low-cost, publishable research on learning to teach; and is easy to orchestrate. Contributors include Lynne Cavazos, Alison Cook-Sather, Susan Florio-Ruane, Lily Orland, Taffy E. Raphael, Frances Rust, Stephen A. Swidler, and Michal Zellermayer. (Teacher’s College Press)
Alison Cook-Sather, Learning from the Student’s Perspective: A Sourcebook for Effective Teaching
Much has been written about how to engage students in their learning, but very little of it has issued from students themselves. Compiled by one of the leading scholars in the field of student voice, this sourcebook draws on the perspectives of secondary students in the United States, England, Canada, and Australia as well as on the work of teachers, researchers, and teacher educators who have collaborated with a wide variety of students. Bringing together in a single text student perspectives, descriptions of successful efforts to access them in secondary education contexts, concrete advice for practitioners, and a theoretical framework for further exploration, this sourcebook can be used to guide practice and support re-imagining education in secondary schools of all kinds, and the principles can be adapted for other educational contexts. (Paradigm Publishers)
Alison Cook-Sather, Education Is Translation: A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching
Education Is Translation offers a radical redefinition of the promises and possibilities of teaching and learning. Through an unusual weaving of not only disciplinary but also personal and academic, poetic, and analytical perspectives, Alison Cook-Sather argues that education can be understood as a process of translation through which every learner is both the translator and the subject of her own translation. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, literary theory, psychology, translation studies, and educational theory, she presents in-depth explorations of various educational experiences and provides the insights necessary for the development of rewarding life-long strategies for becoming a more effective teacher and a better learner. (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries
Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education. Elbow explores the “contraries” in the educational process, in particular his theory that clear thinking can be enhanced by inviting indecision, incoherence, and paradoxical thinking. The essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, are engaged in a single enterprise: to arrive at insights or conclusions about learning and teaching while still doing justice to the “rich messiness” of intellectual inquiry. Drawing his conclusions from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher, Peter Elbow discusses the value of interdisciplinary teaching, his theory of “cooking” (an interaction of conflicting ideas), the authority relationship in teaching and the value of specifying learning objectives. (Oxford University Press)
Peter Filene, The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors
Gathering concepts and techniques borrowed from outstanding college professors, The Joy of Teaching provides helpful guidance for new instructors developing and teaching their first college courses. Award-winning professor Peter Filene proposes that teaching should not be like a baseball game in which the instructor pitches ideas to students to see whether they hit or strike out. Ideally, he says, teaching should resemble a game of Frisbee in which the teacher invites students to catch ideas and pass them on. Rather than prescribe a single model for success, Filene examines the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical strategies, inviting new teachers to make choices based on their own personalities, values, and goals. (University of North Carolina Press)
L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses
Dee Fink poses a fundamental question for all teachers: “How can I create courses that will provide significant learning experiences for my students?” He urges teachers to shift from a content-centered approach to a learning-centered approach that asks “What kinds of learning will be significant for students, and how can I create a course that will result in that kind of learning?” Creating Significant Learning Experiences also offers valuable recommendations on what various organizations in higher education can do to more effectively support better teaching. Based on six key needs that faculty have when changing the way they teach, Fink identifies several specific actions for decisionmakers in colleges and universities, accrediting agencies, funding agencies, journals on teaching, and disciplinary associations. (Jossey-Bass)
William Glasser, The Quality School: Managing Students Without Coercion
In 1990 Dr. William Glasser created the concept of a quality school – a school where there is no failure because all students are doing competent work and many a doing quality work. In the years since the first edition of this book was published, over two hundred schools are working with the Quality School Consortium trying to become quality schools. (HarperPerennial)
Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don’t Know
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. (Harvard University Press)
James M. Lang, On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching
On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you’re trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life. (Harvard University Press)
Angela Provitera McGlynn, Successful Beginnings for College Teaching: Engaging your students from the first day
Angela Provitera McGlynn tells that the first day is not the day to pass out a syllabus and let everyone go. Rather, it’s the day to set the context for the rest of the semester. McGlynn stresses the need for developing an atmosphere of respect for diversity while simultaneously providing a safe and exciting place to explore differences. Included are a variety of ice breakers and other exercises to keep students engaged and interacting. In addition, such vital issues as classroom dynamics, motivating students, and dealing with incivility are addressed with suggestions for promoting positive interactions. (Atwood)
Wilbert J. McKeachie, Teaching Tips
McKeachie’s Teaching Tips is a handbook designed to provide helpful strategies for dealing with both the everyday problems of teaching at the university level, and those that pop up in trying to maximize learning for every student. The suggested strategies are supported by research and are grounded in enough theory to enable teachers to adapt them to their own situations. The author does not suggest a “set of recipes” to be followed mechanically, but gives teachers the tools they need to deal with the ever changing dynamics of teaching and learning. (Houghton Mifflin)
Linda B. Nilson and Judith Miller, To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development
The development of students is a fundamental purpose of higher education and requires for its success effective advising, teaching, leadership, and management. Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) fosters human development in higher education through faculty, instructional, and organizational development. A smart mix of big-picture themes, national developments, and examples of effective faculty development initiatives from a variety of schools, To Improve the Academy offers examples and resources for the enrichment of all educational developers. This annual volume incorporates all the latest need-to-know information for faculty developers and administrators. (Jossey-Bass)
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity
Written in 1971, Teaching as a Subversive Activity is a no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods–with dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today’s world. (Delta)
Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi, Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback and Promote Student Learning
This book provides a complete introduction for anyone starting out to integrate rubrics in their teaching. The authors go on to describe a variety of processes to construct rubrics, including some which involve student participation. They demonstrate how interactive rubrics–a process involving assessors and the assessed in defining the criteria for an assignment or objective–can be effective, not only in involving students more actively in their learning, but in establishing consistent standards of assessment at the program, department and campus level. (Stylus)
D. Thiessen and Alison Cook-Sather, International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School
The International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School is the first handbook of its kind to be published. It brings together in a single volume the groundbreaking work of scholars who have conducted studies of student experiences of school in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, England, Ghana, Ireland, Pakistan, and the United States. Drawing extensively on students interpretations of their experiences in school as expressed in their own words, chapter authors offer insights into how students conceptualize and approach school, how students understand and address the ongoing social opportunities for and challenges in working with other students and teachers, and the multiple ways in which students shape and contribute to school improvement. The individual chapters are framed by an opening chapter, which provides background on, bases of, and trends in research on students experiences of school, and a final chapter, which uses the interpretive framework translation provides to explore how researching students experiences of school challenges those involved to translate the qualitative research methods they use, the terms they evoke to describe and define students experiences of schools, and, in fact, themselves as researchers. (Springer)
Carmen Werder and Megan M. Otis, Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning
This book addresses the all-important dimensions of collaboration in the study of learning raised by such questions as: Should teachers engage students directly in discussions and inquiry about learning? To what extent? What is gained by the collaboration? Does it improve learning, and what do shared responsibilities mean for classroom dynamics, and beyond? Practicing what it advocates, a faculty-student team co-edited Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning, and faculty-student (or former student) teams co-authored eight of its eleven chapters. While recognizing the impossibility of engaging every student in the scholarship of teaching and learning in every course, the editors and contributors make the case for making such opportunities available as broadly as possible because, as this volume also makes clear, this is transformational work – with the potential to produce paradigm shifts, turning points, new insights, and changes in classroom culture – for both faculty and students. The contributors demonstrate how they validated student voices in theory, method, and methodology across a wide variety of disciplines and while engaging with different pedagogies. (Stylus)
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design
What is understanding and how does it differ from knowing? What do we want students to understand and be able to do? How will we know that students truly understand and can apply knowledge in a meaningful way? How can we design our courses and units to emphasize understanding and “uncoverage” rather than “coverage”? Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, explores these questions and provides practical solutions for the teacher-designer. The book opens by analyzing the logic of backward design as an alternative to coverage and activity-oriented plans. The text proposes a multifaceted approach, with the six “facets” of understanding. The facets combine with backward design to provide a powerful, practical framework for designing curriculum, assessment, and instruction. (Prentice Hall)
March 17 2010 09:08 am