Teaching Resources

Elizabeth F. Barkley, Student Engagement Techniques
Student Engagement Techniques 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 from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students.

John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2^nd ed.
In this thoroughly revised and updated edition, John Bean offers a practical guide for designing writing and critical thinking activities and incorporating them into courses across all disciplines in ways that stimulate inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate. Bean integrates recent pedagogical research, brings rhetorical theory to bear on writing in the disciplines, addresses quantitative and scientific literacy, advocates a new approach to the research paper, includes activities for online and blended learning environments, and offers new ideas for transformative assessment of student learning.

Derek Bruff, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments
The use of classroom response systems, or “clickers,” which enable instructors to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to questions during class, has proven to both engage students in course material and provide valuable feedback on students’ learning and perspectives for instructors. Bruff includes illustrative examples of the range of questions that can be used effectively with clickers.

Kathleen F. Gabriel, Creating the Path To Success in the Classroom: Teaching to Close the Graduation Gap for Minority, First-Generation, and Academically Unprepared Students
This book provides faculty with 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. Gabriel 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.

Virginia S. Lee (Ed.), Teaching and Learning Through Inquiry: A Guidebook for Institutions and Instructors
Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) refers to an array of classroom practices that promote student learning through guided and increasingly independent investigation of complex questions and problems. Rather than teaching the results of others’ investigations, which students learn passively, instructors assist students in mastering and learning through the process of active investigation itself. IGL develops critical thinking, independent inquiry, students’ responsibility for their own learning and intellectual growth and maturity.

Gail Taylor Rice, Hitting Pause: 65 Lecture Breaks to Refresh and Reinforce Learning
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.

Scott Simkins and Mark H. Maier, eds. Just in Time Teaching: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy
Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is a pedagogical approach that requires students to answer questions related to an upcoming class a few hours beforehand, using an online course management system. Students who experience JiTT come to class better prepared and report that it helps to focus and organize their out-of-class studying. This book provides an overview of JiTT, introduces the various dimensions of the pedagogy, and demonstrates JiTT’s remarkable cross-disciplinary impact with examples of applications in physics, biology, the geosciences, economics, history, and the humanities.

Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan with Raja Thiagarajan, BARNGA: A Simulation Game on Cultural Clashes
BARNGA is the classic simulation game for exploring communication challenges across cultures. While playing the game, participants experience the shock of realizing that despite good intentions, people interpret things differently, one from one another, in profound ways. Players learn that they must understand and reconcile these differences in order to become a functioning group.

Maryellen Weimer, Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice
Learner-Centered Teaching shows how to tie teaching and curriculum to the process and objectives of learning rather than to content delivery alone.

Mary J. Allen, Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education
Written for college and university administrators, assessment officers, department chairs, and faculty who are involved in developing and implementing assessment programs, this book is a realistic, pragmatic guide for developing and implementing meaningful, manageable, and sustainable assessment programs that focus faculty attention on student learning.

Trudy W. Banta, Elizabeth A. Jones, and Karen E. Black, Designing Effective Assessment: Principles and Profiles of Good Practice
Banta, Jones, and Black offer 49 detailed current examples of good practice in planning, implementing, and sustaining assessment that are practical and ready to apply in new settings. This important resource can help educators put in place an effective process for determining what works and which improvements will have the most impact in improving curriculum, methods of instruction, and student services on college and university campuses.

Linda B. Nilson, Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time
Nilson puts forward an innovative but practical and tested approach to grading that can demonstrably raise academic standards, motivate students, tie their achievement of learning outcomes to their course grades, save faculty time and stress, and provide the reliable gauge of student learning that the public and employers are looking for. This book features many examples of courses that faculty have adapted to specs grading and lays out the surprisingly simple transition process. It is intended for all members of higher education who teach, whatever the discipline and regardless of rank, as well as those who oversee, train, and advise teachers.

Barbara E Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment
Effective Grading is written for the faculty member who believes the grading process is a valuable measure of student learning. This hands-on guide for evaluating student work offers an in-depth examination of the linkage between teaching and grading. It uses grades not as isolated artifacts, but as part of a process that, when integrated with course objectives, provides rich information about student learning.

Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment: Designing Assessment to Inform and Improve Student Performance
In this book, Grant Wiggins outlines design standards for performance-based assessments that promise students—no matter what their ability—clear and worthy performance targets, useful feedback, coaching, and the opportunity to progress toward excellence.

John Zubizarreta, The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning
This book offers readers both an academic understanding of and rationale for learning portfolios and practical information that can be custom tailored to suit many disciplinary, pedagogical, programmatic, and institutional needs.

Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill, Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms
Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill suggest exercises for starting discussions, strategies for maintaining their momentum, and ways to elicit diverse views and voices.

Terry Doyle, Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment
For many students, encountering a learner-centered environment will be new, possibly unsettling, and may even engender resistance and hostility. The first four chapters of Doyle’s book focus on the importance of imparting to students the evidence and underlying philosophy that is driving higher education to move from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered practice and what this means for students in terms of having control over, and making important choices about, their learning. The final eight chapters offer guidance on creating the classroom environment and opportunities that nurture and develop student learning.

Kathleen F. Gabriel, Teaching Unprepared Students: Strategies for Promoting Success and Retention in Higher Education
This book provides professors and their graduate teaching assistants 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.

Christine Harrington and Todd D. Zakrajsek, Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness
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.

James M. Lang, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty
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 practice guide to tackling academic dishonesty at its roots.

Steven M. Richardon, Ed. Promoting Civility: A Teaching Challenge
Clearly we have to learn to handle incivility. If we take a passive view of classroom behavior until things go wrong around us, we fail in a crucial dimension of our role as teachers: creating optimal conditions for learning. Although each chapter in this volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning addresses the instructor’s unhappy task of dealing with incivility, the authors have concluded that the primary challenge for teachers is to use the classroom as a place to learn acceptable behavior. The task of shaping a positive climate and dealing with occasional discord is what they have called promoting civility.

Larry K. Michaelsen, Arletta Bauman Knight, and L. Dee Fink, Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching
This book describes team-based learning (TBL), an unusually powerful and versatile teaching strategy that enables teachers to take small-group learning to a new level of effectiveness. It is the only pedagogical use of small groups that is based on a recognition of the critical difference between “groups” and “teams,” and intentionally employs specific procedures to transform newly formed groups into high-performance learning teams.

Larry K. Michaelsen, Michael Sweet, and Dean X. Parmelee (Eds.), Team-Based Learning: Small Group Learning’s Next Big Step
Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a unique form of small-group learning designed in and for the college classroom. TBL’s special combination of incentives and corrective feedback quickly transforms groups into high-performance learning teams, with no time taken from the coverage of course content. In this issue, the authors describe the practical elements of TBL, how it can look in the classroom, and what they have learned as it has grown into an interdisciplinary and international practice

Michael Sweet and Larry K. Michaelsen (eds.), Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and Humanities
This book introduces the practical elements of Team-Based Learning (TBL) and how to apply them in the social sciences and humanities, paying particular attention to the specification of learning goals, which can be a unique challenge in these fields. The core of the book consists of examples of how TBL has been incorporated into the cultures of disciplines as varied as economics, education, literature, politics, psychology, and theatre.

John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd ed.
This book’s “how to” approach addresses several important issues: designing high level outcomes, the learning activities most likely to achieve them in small and large classes, and appropriate assessment and grading procedures. It is an accessible, jargon-free guide for all university teachers interested in enhancing their teaching and their students’ learning, and for administrators and teaching developers who are involved in teaching-related decisions on an institution-wide basis.

Stephen D. Brookfield, Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting
This award-winning book offers a practical, straightforward guide to helping adults develop their critical thinking skills in four key arenas of adult life: in their personal relationships, in their workplaces, in their political involvements, and in their responses to the media.

Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles, Jr., Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?
Enthusiastic advocates of service-learning have tended to emphasize its “service” benefits: they promote more widespread adoption of service-learning in higher education because they see it as a powerful means of preparing students to become more caring and responsible parents and citizens and of helping colleges and universities to make good on their pledge to “serve society.” This book addresses the “other” benefit of service-learning: its enormous potential for enhancing both the cognitive and affective parts of the learning process.

L. Dee Fink and Arletta Knight Fink, Eds. Designing Courses for Significant Learning: Voice of Experience
This issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning contains multiple stories of how college-level teachers have used Dee Fink’s ideas of significant learning and integrated course design in a variety of teaching situations, with subject matter ranging from the sciences to the humanities. Their conclusion? The ideas in Fink’s book truly make a difference. When used properly, they lead to major improvements in the level of student engagement and the quality of student learning!

Paul Hanstedt, Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World
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.

Christine Harrington and Todd D. Zakrajsek, Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness
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.

James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning
Cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists all have produced a revealing body of research over the past several decades on how human beings learn, but often translating these findings into the classroom is overwhelming for busy instructors. Small Teaching bridges the gap between research and practice by providing a fully developed strategy for making deliberate, structured, and incremental steps towards tuning into how your students are hardwired to learn.

Joan Middendorf and Leah Shopkow, Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks: Decode the Critical Thinking of Your Discipline
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 work through them.

Tim Riordan and James Leonard Roth, Disciplines as Frameworks for Student Learning: Teaching the Practice of the Disciplines
Creating ways to make a discipline come alive for those who are not experts requires rigorous thought about what really matters in a field and how to engage students in the practice of it. Faculty from Alverno College representing a range of liberal arts disciplines–-chemistry, economics, history, literature, mathematics and philosophy–-here reflect on what it has meant for them to approach their disciplines as frameworks for student learning. They present the intellectual biographies of their explorations, the insights they have gained, and examples of the practices they have adopted.

Shawn R. Simonson. POGIL: An Introduction to Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning for Those who Wish to Empower Learners
Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is a pedagogy based on research on learning that leads to better student outcomes across a variety of academic disciplines. Beyond facilitating students’ mastery of a discipline, it promotes vital educational outcomes such as communications skills and critical thinking. Its active international community of practitioners provides accessible educational development and support for anyone designing related courses.

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design
This book is about good design—of curriculum, assessment, and instruction—focused on developing and deepening understanding of important ideas. Posed as a question, considered throughout the book and from many perspectives, the essence of this book is this: How do we make it more likely—by our design—that more students really understand what they are asked to learn?

Edward Zlotkowski, Successful Service-Learning Programs: New Models of Excellence in Higher Education
In this book, leaders of service-learning programs share how they have championed successful programs that have enriched their campuses and renewed their communities.

Ken Bain, What The Best College Teachers Do
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.

Stephen D. Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher
Building on the insights of his highly acclaimed earlier work, The Skillful Teacher, and applying the principles of adult learning, Brookfield thoughtfully guides teachers through the processes of becoming critically reflective about teaching, confronting the contradictions involved in creating democratic classrooms, and using critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development.

Stephen D. Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom, 2nd ed.
The Skillful Teacher is a comprehensive guide that shows how to thrive on the unpredictability and diversity of classroom life and includes insights developed from the hundreds of workshops conducted by the author. Brookfield explores the assumption that skillful teaching is grounded in constant research into how students experience learning. The book explores the three R’s of skillful teaching: respect, research, and responsiveness.

Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
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 discovering in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.

Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens
In this book, award-winning science reporter Benedict Carey sifts through decades of education research and landmark studies to uncover the truth about how our brains absorb and retain information. What he discovers is that, from the moment we are born, we are all learning quickly, efficiently, and automatically; but in our zeal to systematize the process we have ignored valuable, naturally enjoyable learning tools like forgetting, sleeping, and daydreaming. Is a dedicated desk in a quiet room really the best way to study? Can altering your routine improve your recall? Are there times when distraction is good? Is repetition necessary? Carey’s search for answers to these questions yields a wealth of strategies that make learning more a part of our everyday lives–and less of a chore.

Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself
The discovery that our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains—even into old age—is the most important breakthrough in neuroscience in four centuries. In this revolutionary look at the brain, Norman Doidge introduces both the scientists championing this new science of neuroplasticity and the astonishing process of the people whose lives they’ve transformed.

Carol S. Dweck, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development
This book sheds light on how people work—why they sometimes function well and, at other times, behave in ways that are self-defeating or destructive. Carol Dweck presents her groundbreaking research on adaptive and maladaptive cognitive-motivational patterns. Throughout, she shows how examining self-theories illuminates basic issues of human motivation, social cognition, personality, the self, mental health, and development. Her findings provide an important context for decoding student behavior and thinking about motivation in the classroom.

Kenneth A. Feldman and Michael B. Paulsen, Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom, 2nd ed.
This is a broad-based reader designed to increase the awareness and understanding of the most important issues, practices and research associated with the principles of effective teaching and learning in the college classroom. This book should serve as a resource for graduate students, faculty members, administrators, and any others with an interest in higher education.

Heather Fry, Steve Ketteridge, and Stephanie Marshall (eds.), A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice, 3rd ed.
This book focuses on developing professional academic skills for teaching. Dealing with the rapid expansion of the use of technology in higher education and widening student diversity, this fully updated and expanded edition includes new material on, for example, e-learning, lecturing to large groups, formative and summative assessment, and supervising research students.

Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe
Our schools and colleges often make the intellectual life seem more impenetrable, narrowly specialized, and inaccessible than it is or needs to be, argues the eminent scholar and educator Gerald Graff, whose provocative book offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more readily understandable.

Diane F. Halpern & Associates, Changing College Classrooms: New Teaching and Learning Strategies for an Increasingly Complex World
This book combines a range of promising instructional strategies with helpful guidelines for assessing the effectiveness of instruction. It will help faculty and administrators equip students with the creative, critical, technological, and problem-solving skills—as well as a coherent sense of multicultural awareness—necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing society.

Nira Hativa, Teaching for Effective Learning in Higher Education
This book identifies the strategies that are consistently associated with good teaching and explains how they promote students’ active and meaningful learning. By presenting teaching as a logical structure of interconnected behaviors whose contribution to student learning is based on theory and research, the book promotes teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and their perception of teaching as scholarly intellectual work.

Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don’t Know
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. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students’ understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for planning your class so you’re not overworked all the time, and for dealing with those impossible questions.

James M. Lang, On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching
This book is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new faculty clutching the podium for the first time. Divided into fifteen chapters to match the weeks of the semester, On Course provides a wide range of innovative and traditional teaching strategies. They work—and they won’t overwhelm you with extensive preparation or grading time when you’re also trying to do your research, meet service requirements, learn your way around a new campus, and remember your children’s names.

John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
In Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we touch our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a Brain Rule—what scientists know for sure about how our brains work—and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives, many of which will influence the way we think about teaching.

Linda B. Nilson, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating your Course
This book shows college instructors how to communicate their course organization to students in a graphic syllabus—a one-page diagram, flowchart, or concept map of the topical organization—and an outcomes map—a one-page flowchart of the sequence of student learning objectives and outcomes from the foundational through the mediating to the ultimate. It also documents the positive impact that graphics have on student learning and cautions readers about common errors in designing graphic syllabi.

Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us
Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money. That’s a mistake, says this book. The secret to performance and satisfaction is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action. Though many of his examples are from business, they are easily applicable to classroom settings.

Phil Race, The Lecturer’s Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching
This is a wide-ranging, down-to-earth, practical resource for lecturers and teachers in higher education that addresses a broad range of aspects of assessment, learning, and teaching, and helps develop many facets of professional practice.

Laurie Richlin, Blueprint for Learning: Constructing College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning
This book familiarizes readers with course design elements; enables them to understand themselves as individuals and teachers; know their students; adapt to the learning environment; design courses that promote deep learning; and assess the impact of the teaching practices and design choices they have made. She provides tools to create a full syllabus, offers guidance on such issues as framing questions that encourage discussion, developing assignments with rubrics, and creating tests. What Laurie Richlin offers is a intellectual framework, set of tools and best practices to enable readers to design and continually reassess their courses to better meet their teaching goals and the learning needs of their students.

David Gooblar, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching
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 acadenics 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.

Christine A. Stanley and Erin M. Porter (Eds.), Engaging Large Classes: Strategies and Techniques for College Faculty
Experienced teachers of large classes across a wide range of disciplines and institutions offer instructional strategies and advice for both new and experienced faculty members. What many of the contributors have learned is that large classes can be just as stimulating and rewarding as small ones, and that the large size can yield surprisingly positive opportunities.

John D. Bransford et al., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, Expanded Edition
When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from nonexperts? What can teachers and schools do—with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods—to help children learn most effectively? This book offers new research about the mind, the brain, and the processes of learning that provides answers to these and other questions. New information from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our students learn.

James R. Davis, Better Teaching, More Learning: Strategies for Success in Postsecondary Settings
This work examines how people learn and how post-secondary teachers can use current knowledge about learning to teach more effectively. It synthesises works on learning by a range of scholars and offers five strategies that teachers can adapt to their particular situations.

Regan A. R. Gurung, Nancy L. Chick, and Aeron Haynie, Exploring Signature Pedagogies
This book asks the question: How does each discipline foster deep learning and help students think like disciplinary experts? With contributions from the sciences, humanities, and the arts, this book offers a critical evaluation of how to best foster student learning across the disciplines.

David Pace and Joan Middendorf, eds., Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking
The Decoding the Disciplines model takes advantage of the differences in thinking among academic fields to decode each individual discipline. These chapters, written by faculty, define crucial bottlenecks to learning, dissect the ways an expert deals with the issues that cause the bottleneck, and invent ways to model this thinking for their students.

Marilla D. Svinicki, Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom
While there is much available research and theory about learning and motivation, until now there has been no resource that translates esoteric findings into everyday language and examples that can be readily applied in college classrooms. This book brings the findings and theories of educational psychology to classroom faculty, helping them to adopt a scholarly approach to understanding their students’ learning problems.

James E. Zull, From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education
With his knack for making science intelligible for the layman, and his ability to illuminate scientific concepts through analogy and reference to personal experience, James Zull offers the reader an engrossing and coherent introduction to what neuroscience can tell us about cognitive development through experience, and implications for education. At a time when we can expect to change jobs and careers frequently during our lifetimes, when technology is changing society at breakneck speed, and we have instant access to almost infinite information and opinion, he argues that self-knowledge, awareness of how and why we think as we do, and the ability to adapt and learn, are critical to our survival as individuals and that the transformation of education, in the light of all this and what neuroscience can tell us, is a key element in the future development of healthy and productive societies.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do
The author of the best-selling book What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college ― and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book―college graduates who went on to change the world we live in―aimed higher than straight A’s. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives.

Susan D. Blum, My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture
Today’s college students seem to operate under an entirely different set of assumptions about plagiarism than do their professors. Practices that even a decade ago would have been universally regarded as academically dishonest are now commonplace. Dismissing simplistic condemnation in favor of a rich account of how students actually think about education, accomplishment, and originality, My Word! reveals two distinct cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom.

Kathleen F. Gabriel, Creating the Path To Success in the Classroom: Teaching to Close the Graduation Gap for Minority, First-Generation, and Academically Unprepared Students
This book provides faculty with 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. Gabriel 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.

Saundra Yancy McGuire (with Stephanie McGuire), Teach Students How to Learn
For more than a decade Saundra Yancy 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 15 years, ideas that are being adopted by an increasing number of faculty with considerable effect.

Linda B. Nilson, Creating Self-Regulated Learning: Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills
Nilson 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.

Anton O. Tolman and Janine Kremling, Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students
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.

Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it Drives Science
Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, says Firestein, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. Firestein shows how scientists use ignorance to program their work, to identify what should be done, what the next steps are, and where they should concentrate their energies. And he includes a catalog of how scientists use ignorance, consciously or unconsciously—a remarkable range of approaches that includes looking for connections to other research, revisiting apparently settled questions, using small questions to get at big ones, and tackling a problem simply out of curiosity.

Calvin S. Kalman, Successful Science and Engineering Teaching in Colleges and Universities
Based on the author’s work in science and engineering educational research, this book offers broad, practical strategies for teaching science and engineering courses and describes how faculty can provide a learning environment that helps students comprehend the nature of science, understand science concepts, and solve problems in science courses.

National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, Science, Evolution, and Creationism
In this book, a group of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of medicine explain the fundamental methods of science, document the overwhelming evidence in support of biological evolution, and evaluate the alternative perspectives offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including “intelligent design.”

Andrew J. Vickers, What is a p-value anyway? 34 Stories to Help You Actually Understand Statistics
What is a p-value anyway? offers a fun introduction to the fundamental principles of statistics, presenting the essential concepts in thirty-four brief, enjoyable stories. Drawing on his experience as a medical researcher, Vickers blends insightful explanations and humor, with minimal math, to help readers understand and interpret the statistics they read every day

David G. Brown, Interactive Learning: Vignettes from America’s Most Wired Campuses
In 93 brief, informal, and practical vignettes, professors show how they transformed courses with technology, discuss how the technology affected teaching and learning, and distill important lessons learned.

Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines
This groundbreaking book offers a down-to-earth resource for the practical application of blended learning in higher education as well as a comprehensive examination of the topic. Well-grounded in research, Blended Learning in Higher Education demonstrates how the blended learning approach embraces the traditional values of face-to-face teaching and integrates the best practices of online learning.

John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom
A practical nuts and bolts guide for teachers from any discipline who want to design interest-provoking writing and critical thinking activities.

Susan D. Blum, My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture
Today’s college students seem to operate under an entirely different set of assumptions about plagiarism than do their professors. Practices that even a decade ago would have been universally regarded as academically dishonest are now commonplace. Dismissing simplistic condemnation in favor of a rich account of how students actually think about education, accomplishment, and originality, My Word! reveals two distinct cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom.