Teaching Resources

These titles are designed to help with a broad range of classroom issues, from day-to-day management to overall course design.

Active Learning Strategies

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
A practical nuts and bolts guide for teachers from any discipline who want to design interest-provoking writing and critical thinking activities.

John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd 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.

Charles C. Bonwell and James A. Eison, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom
This slim guide outlines activities to make the college classroom more engaging for students. It includes the basics, such as how to modify lectures and using in-class writing, as well as advanced techniques like roll-playing, debates, and peer teaching.

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.

Mark Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Change College
In Minds on Fire, Mark C. 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.

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.

John P. Hertel and Barbara J. Millis, Using Simulations to Promote Learning in Higher Education: An Introduction
A powerful tool for learning, simulations allow teachers to integrate multiple teaching objectives in a single process. They motivate students, provide opportunities for active participation, promote deep learning, develop interactive and communication skills, and link knowledge and theory to application. This book provides an introduction to the use of simulations—from creating simple scenarios that can be completed in a single class period to extended, complex simulations that may encompass a semester’s curriculum.

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.

Gregor M. Novak, Evelyn T. Patterson, Andrew D. Gavrin, and Wolfgang Christian, Just-In-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Technology
Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is a teaching and learning strategy designed to promote the use of class time for more active learning. Students prepare for class by reading from the textbook or using other resources posted to the web and by completing assignments online. These assignments often have complex answers; students’ work outside class serves as preparation for more complete work in class. The students’ answers are delivered to the instructor a few hours before class starts, allowing the instructor to adapt the lesson as needed. Importantly, JiTT allows the instructor to create an interactive classroom environment that emphasizes active learning and cooperative problem solving.

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.

Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner
The reflective practitioner is one who participates in a practicum in the professional school which will help him or her “acquire the kinds of artistry essential to competence in the indeterminate zones of practice.” Schon argues that professional schools (from engineering to public administration to teaching) rely too heavily on scientific knowledge and technical rationality while giving little attention to “reflection-in-action.” Schon now details a program of reflective practicum education in the professional schools.

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.

Donna M. Stringer and Patricia A. Cassiday, 52 Activities for Exploring Values Differences
This book features sound, ready-to-use activities for settings where the exploration of values differences is beneficial, including the classroom. The activities cover a broad spectrum for the varied needs of trainers and teachers: those who like hands-on, practical but low-risk activities; those who prefer experiential activities; and those who learn best if they can reflect on ideas.

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.

Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, Thiagi’s 100 Favorite Games
Thiagi’s 100 Favorite Games is a new resource from one of the world’s foremost authorities on interactive learning. This collection represents game-play at its very best. Thiagi offers the “how-to” for his all-time favorite games.

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.

Back to Top

Assessment of Student Learning

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.

Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers
In this book, Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross provide a practical handbook to help college faculty—and teachers in other settings—develop a better understanding of the learning process in their own classrooms and assess the impact of their teaching upon it.

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.

Richard E. Lyons, Meggin McIntosh, and Marcella L. Kysilka, Teaching College in an Age of Accountability
This book provides professors with the insights and tools necessary to achieve higher levels on accountability assessment outcomes while preparing students for enhancing their own career success in a more complex future. Accountability proponents generally call for increased access to higher education for all citizens, improved retention of students once they are enrolled, and graduation and placement rates that recognize the investment of tax and institutional funds in students’ success. This book equips professors to address each of these outcome goals in a proactive manner.

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.

Linda Suskie, Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, 2nd ed.
The second edition of this landmark book offers practical guidance and is designed to meet ever-increasing demands for improvement and accountability. This guide covers assessment topics such as promoting an assessment culture, assessing attitudes and values, setting benchmarks and standards, and using results to inform and improve teaching, learning, planning, and decision-making.

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.

Barbara E. Walvoord, Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education
Assessment Clear and Simple is “Assessment 101” in a book—a concise, step-by-step guide written for everyone who participates in the assessment process.

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.

Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Allison Boye and Suzanne Tapp (Eds.) Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership: A Guide to Implementing the Transparency Framework Institution-Wide to Improve Learning and Retention
Transparent instruction involves faculty/student discussion about several important aspects of academic work before students undertake that work, making explicit the purpose of the work, the knowledge that will be gained and its utility in students’ lives beyond college; explaining the tasks involved, the expected criteria, and providing multiple examples of real-world work applications of the specific academic discipline. The simple change of making objective and methods explicit – that faculty recognize as consistent with their teaching goals – creates substantial benefits for students and demonstrably increases such predictors of college students’ success as academic confidence, sense of belonging in college, self-awareness of skill development, and persistence.

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.

Back to Top

Classroom Strategies and Management

Ronald A. Berk, Professors Are From Mars, Students Are From Snickers
Professors and students seem to come from different planets (or candy bars). Barriers naturally exist that impede their communication, such as title, age, income, and cholesterol level. Humor can break down these barriers so that professors can better connect with their students and other audiences. It can be used as a teaching tool to facilitate learning. A variety of techniques that can be integrated systematically into instruction and professional presentations are described and illustrated.

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.

Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill, Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, 2nd ed.
Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the landmark book 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 expands on the original and 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.   

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.

Peter Filene, The Joy of Teaching
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.

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.

Barbara Gross Davis, Tools for Teaching
Forty-nine teaching tools organized into twelve sections, cover both traditional tasks—writing a course syllabus, delivering an effective lecture—and newer, broader, concerns, a set of general strategies, such as responding to diversity and using technology.

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.

Jay R. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online
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.

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.

Wilbert J. McKeachie and Graham Gibbs. Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research and Theory for College and University Teachers
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.

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.

Back to Top

Collaborative Learning

James. L. Cooper, Pamela Robinson, and David Ball, Small Group Instruction in Higher Education
This volume presents a look at the history of small group instruction research, theory and practice and offers a glimpse at the future of this powerful instructional strategy.

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 et al. (Eds.), Team-Based Learning for Health Professions Education: A Guide to Using Small Groups for Improving Learning
This book is an introduction to Team-Based Learning (TBL) for health professions educators. In addition to outlining the theory, structure, and process of TBL, it explains how TBL promotes problem solving and critical thinking skills, aligns with the goals of science and health courses, improves knowledge retention and application, and develops students as professional practitioners. The book provides readers with models and guidance on everything they need to know about team formation and maintenance, peer feedback and evaluation processes, and facilitation. It also includes a directory of tools and resources.

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

Jim Sibley and Peter Ostafichuk, Getting Started with Team-Based Learning
TBL is a uniquely powerful form of small-group learning. It harnesses the power of teams and social learning with accountability structures and instructional sequences. This book provides the guidance, from first principles to examples of practice, together with concrete advice, suggestions, and tips to help you suceeed in the TBL classroom. This book will help you understand what TBL is and why it is so powerful. You will find what you need to plan, build, implement, and use TBL effectively.

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.

Back to Top

Designing Learning Experiences

Susan A. Ambrose et al., How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching
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.

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.

Larry A. Braskamp, Lois Calian Trautvetter, and Kelly Ward, Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Students Purposefully
In this book, the authors argue that colleges should purposefully invest in students in ways that will foster their holistic development by recognizing and building on students’ purpose in life, intellectually, spiritually, and morally. But using the “4C framework”—culture, curriculum, cocurriculum, and community—faculty, student affairs staff, and academic administrators will be able to discuss, plan, and create a college environment that effectively supports the learning and development of students. The book contains a set of themes and calls for consideration and action based on the findings of site visits at 10 colleges as well as a set of questions to help readers think about and plan how to develop students holistically on their own campuses.

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.

James R. Davis, Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching: New Arrangements for Learning
This book explains the benefits and pitfalls of interdisciplinary, team-taught courses and provides current, practical information on how to design and conduct them. Using examples from existing courses, he presents a convincing argument that team-taught, interdisciplinary classes are an improvement over the traditional disciplinary structure. Dr. Davis uses these examples to construct an “ideal” template for college teachers and administrators interested in implementing this innovative teaching method.

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.

Joshua Eyler, How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching
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.

Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College
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.

L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses
Fink takes important existing ideas in the literature on college teaching (active learning, educative assessment), adds some new ideas (a taxonomy of significant learning, the concept of a teaching strategy), and shows how to systematically combine these in a way that results in powerful learning experiences for students.

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!

Judith Grunert, The Course Syllabus: A Learning-Centered Approach
This practical manual presents why and how to construct a syllabus that shifts from what you will cover (the traditional syllabus) to one that reflects what tools and information you can provide students to help them learn (the learning-centered syllabus).

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.

John P. Hertel and Barbara J. Millis, Using Simulations to Promote Learning in Higher Education: An Introduction
Simulations create a complete environment within which students can apply theory to and practice skills in real-world issues related to their discipline. A powerful tool for learning, simulations allow teachers to integrate multiple teaching objectives in a single process. They motivate students, provide opportunities for active participation, promote deep learning, develop interactive and communication skills, and link knowledge and theory to application. This book provides an introduction to the use of simulations—from creating simple scenarios that can be completed in a single class period to extended, complex simulations that may encompass a semester’s curriculum.

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.

Matthew Kaplan et al. (Eds.), Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy
Research has identified the importance of helping students develop the ability to monitor their own comprehension and to make their thinking processes explicit, and indeed demonstrates that metacognitive teaching strategies greatly improve student engagement with course material. By presenting principles that teachers in higher education can put into practice in their own classrooms, this book explains how to lay the groundwork for this engagement and help students become self-regulated learners actively employing metacognitive and reflective strategies in their education.

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.

Claire Howell Major, Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success
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; and 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.

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.

Laurie Richlin, Blueprint for Learning: Constructing College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning
Laurie Richlin offers an intellectual framework and set of tools and best practices to enable readers to design and continually reassess and improve their courses and student learning. It helps 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 and offers guidance on such issues as framing questions that encourage discussion, developing assignments with rubrics, and creating tests.

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.

Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners
Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard’s Project Zero, that develops students’ thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study.  Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines, small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps, as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process, thinking becomes visible as the students’ different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon.

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.

Peter B. Vaill, Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water
In Learning as a Way of Being, Vaill offers a thoughtful critique of the roots of management education and argues that, if managers are to navigate the waters skillfully, institutions of “higher learning” must, above all, teach managers how to integrate the discipline of learning into their very being.

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?

Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Allison Boye and Suzanne Tapp (Eds.) Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership: A Guide to Implementing the Transparency Framework Institution-Wide to Improve Learning and Retention
Transparent instruction involves faculty/student discussion about several important aspects of academic work before students undertake that work, making explicit the purpose of the work, the knowledge that will be gained and its utility in students’ lives beyond college; explaining the tasks involved, the expected criteria, and providing multiple examples of real-world work applications of the specific academic discipline. The simple change of making objective and methods explicit – that faculty recognize as consistent with their teaching goals – creates substantial benefits for students and demonstrably increases such predictors of college students’ success as academic confidence, sense of belonging in college, self-awareness of skill development, and persistence.

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.

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.

Back to Top

General Books on and Related To Teaching

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.

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, 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, Teaching for Critical Thinking
In his engaging, conversational style, Brookfield establishes a basic protocol of critical thinking that focuses on students uncovering and checking assumptions, exploring alternative perspectives, and taking informed actions. The book fosters a shared understanding of critical thinking and helps all faculty adapt general principles to specific disciplinary contexts.

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.

Stephen D. Brookfield, Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning
Stephen D. Brookfield analyzes current approaches to adult learning, presents a comprehensive review of the research on how adults learn, and proposes ways to develop more innovative adult learning programs.

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.

William E. Campbell and Karl A. Smith (Eds.), New Paradigms for College Teaching
New Paradigms was written for faculty searching for new ways to help students learn. Chapters provide a variety of methodologies including cooperative learning, writing-across-the-curriculum, active learning, and learning communities.

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.

Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Businesses for the 21st Century
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and management, as well as interviews with visionary business and educational leaders, Davidson explodes the myth that multitasking is bad for us and offers a reassuringly optimistic view of our ability to thrive in ways that build on what we know now about how our brains engage with the world. In that spirit Now You See It takes us on an insider’s tour of the future of work and education, helping us to appreciate and prepare for a world in which everyone’s contribution is necessary for success.

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, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success—but whether we approach our goals with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising our children’s intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. She reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know, and shows how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.

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 E. Eble, The Craft of Teaching, 2nd ed.
Kenneth Eble’s 1976 classic on college teaching was hailed as one of the best books ever published on the topic. Updated and revised in 1988, this book offers fresh insights on issues of enduring importance—from how to help students learn and how to make the best use of the classroom to the nuts and bolts of assignments, tests, grades, and textbooks.

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.

Donelson R. Forsyth, The Professor’s Guide to Teaching: Psychological Principles and Practices
This book explores what research has revealed about effective teaching and mines this resource to offer useful suggestions and practical recommendations for new and seasoned instructors. Emphasizing current research, Forsyth communicates the elements of effective teaching in the language of scientific psychology.

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.

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.

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.

Anthony E. Grasha, Teaching with Style: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Learning by Understanding Teaching & Learning Styles
The book takes the reader on a journey that includes an understanding of the elements of teaching and learning styles; the need for discovering Who am I as a teacher? And What do I want to become?; personal change processes in teaching; exploring one’s philosophy of teaching; and an integrative model for selecting instructional processes that are keyed to different blends of the Expert, Formal Authority, Personal Model, Facilitator, and Delegator styles of teaching and the Independent, Avoidant, Collaborative, Dependent, Competitive, and Participant learning styles.

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.

Christine Harrington and Melissa Thomas, Designing a Motivational Syllabus: Creating a Learning Path for Student Engagement
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, your syllabus can 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.

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.

Jay Heinrichs. Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson can Teach us about the Art of Persuasion
Heinrichs is a clever, passionate and erudite advocate for rhetoric, the 3,000-year-old art of persuasion, and his user-friendly primer brims with anecdotes, historical and popular-culture references, sidebars, tips and definitions. For teachers who want to help students learn to make arguments, either orally or in writing, this book provides useful examples from traditional historical sources and popular culture.

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.

Marilyn Kallett and April Morgan (Eds.), The Art of College Teaching: 28 Takes
This volume provides a collection of 28 essays about teaching, including 11 written by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Professor of the Year awardees.

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.

Robert Leamnson, Thinking about Teaching and Learning: Developing Habits of Learning with First Year College and University Students
Building on the insights offered by recent discoveries about the biological basis of learning, and on his own thought-provoking definitions of teaching, learning and education, Robert Leamnson proceeds to the practical details of instruction that teachers are most interested in—the things that make or break teaching. The author provides teachers with a map to develop their own teaching philosophy, and effective nuts-and-bolts advice.

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, Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 3rd ed.
This best-selling handbook is an essential toolbox—a compilation of hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises. This revised and expanded edition covers topics relevant to today’s classroom such as technology and the Internet, problem-based learning, diversity, service learning, and faculty evaluation systems.

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.

Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life
In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students—and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavours.

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.

Keith W. Prichard and R. MacLaran Sawyer, Handbook of College Teaching: Theory and Applications
This book provides solid theoretical information on educational psychology and presents practical information on teaching particular disciplines. The volume also overviews different instructional techniques and settings, and discusses general concerns likely to face college faculty.

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.

Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education
This classic text combines practical advice with sound theory to provide a uniquely stimulating introduction to the practice of university teaching. The book has a simple message: to become a good teacher, first you must understand your students’ experiences of learning. Out of this grows a set of principles for teaching in higher education.

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.

John K. Roth (ed.), Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak
Inspiring Teaching is a fascinating and often profound collection of essays written by 19 Carnegie Professors of the Year from a variety of colleges and universities across the U. S. and Canada.

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.

Back to Top

Large Classes

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.

Back to Top

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Rae Andre and Peter J. Frost, Researchers Hooked on Teaching: Noted Scholars Discuss the Synergies of Teaching and Research
This insightful new book suggests that if scholars are to be teachers, then their ability to integrate teaching and research is basic to their well-being over the course of their career, and is probably a predictor of classroom effectiveness as well.

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.

William Condon et al., Faculty Development and Student Learning: Assessing the Connections
Colleges and universities across the United States have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students’ learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess students’ learning is affected by faculty members’ efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.

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.

James R. Davis and Bridget D. Arend, Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective and Enjoyable College Teaching
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 underlying rationale is to provide a framework to match teaching goals to distinct ways of learning, based on well-established theories of learning. The authors present approaches that readers can readily and safely experiment with to achieve desired learning outcomes, and build confidence in changing their methods of teaching.

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.

Robert J. Menges, Maryellen Weimer and Associates, Teaching on Solid Ground: Using Scholarship to Improve Practice
This book helps define and illustrate the concept of scholarship of teaching. For faculty who regard teaching as more than a series of techniques, the authors included in this collection develop ideas that will offer intellectual substance, stimulate reflection, and lead to greater enjoyment from teaching.

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.

Paul Savory, Amy Nelson Burnett, and Amy Goodburn, Inquiry into The College Classroom: A Journey Toward Scholarly Teaching
An essential 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

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, The Art of Changing The Brain
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’s functions in clear non-technical language and an engaging conversational tone, always relating them to the real world of the classroom and his own evolution as a teacher.

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.

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.

Back to Top

Student Perspectives and Development

Alexander W. Astin, What Matters in College? Four Critical Years Revisited
Based on a study of more than 20,000 students, 25,000 faculty members, and 200 institutions, the book shows how academic programs, faculty, student peer groups, and other variables affect students’ college experiences, and how these factors can shape students’ personalities and behavior; values and beliefs; and academic, cognitive, and career development.

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, I Love Learning: I Hate School: An Anthropology of College
Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help students–and people in general–master meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. In this critique of higher education, Blum explains why so much is going wrong and offers suggestions for how to bring classroom learning more in line with appropriate forms of engagement. She challenges our system of education and argues for a “reintegration of learning with life.”

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.

Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek, The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain
Advances in brain science show that most students’ learning strategies are highly inefficient, ineffective, or just plan wrong. While all learning requires effort, better learning does not require more effort, but rather effectively aligning how the brain naturally learns with the demands of your studies. This book shows students what is involved in learning new material, how the brain processes new information, and what it takes for that information to stick even after the test.

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.

Richard J. Light, Making the Most of College
Richard Light interviewed 1600 Harvard students over a ten-year period to discover how to make the most of the college experience. Examining issues including collaborative selection of classes, talking productively with advisers, improving writing and study skills, maximizing the value of research assignments, and connecting learning inside the classroom with the rest of life, this book is a blueprint for academic success.

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.

Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What A Professor Learned By Becoming A Student
This book shares the experiences of an anthropologist who enrolled as a freshman, moved into the dorm, ate in the dining hall, and took a full load of courses. And she came to understand that being a student is a pretty difficult job, too.

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.

Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne M. Bouffard, Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success
Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard focus on the developmental tasks and competencies that young people need to develop in order to plan for and succeed in higher education. These include identity development, articulating aspirations and expectations, forming and maintaining strong peer and adult relationships, motivation and goal-setting, and self-regulatory skills, such as planning. The authors challenge the predominant approach of giving young people information and leaving it to them to figure out how to apply it. They show how well-intended college-access efforts can miss the mark—for instance, by focusing on students who already see themselves as college material, rather than working to help all students develop a “college-going identity.” In addition, most college-access programs and practices focus almost exclusively on providing academic preparation and financial support. Savitz-Romer and Bouffard call for a new approach: one that emphasizes the key developmental tasks and processes of adolescence and integrates them into existing college-access practices in meaningful ways. Rather than treating young people as passive recipients of services, they argue, adults can engage them as active agents in the construction of their own futures.

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.

Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School?
Structured around nine questions addressing key principles of cognitive science, this book uses current research on the brain to examine how learning works and why school doesn’t always inspire the kind of learning we’d like to see from our students. Why Don’t Students Like School? ranges over a variety of subjects in pursuit of two goals that are straightforward but far from simple: to tell you how your students’ minds work and to clarify how to use that knowledge to be a better teacher.

Back to Top

Teaching in Math and Science

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.

Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan, Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks
This volume takes a positive spin on the field of statistics. Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks brings together a complete set of examples, demonstrations and projects that will not only increase class participation, but will also help to minimize students’ negative feelings toward the area of statistics.

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.

Larry K. Michaelsen et al. (Eds.), Team-Based Learning for Health Professions Education: A Guide to Using Small Groups for Improving Learning
This book is an introduction to Team-Based Learning (TBL) for health professions educators. In addition to outlining the theory, structure, and process of TBL, it explains how TBL promotes problem solving and critical thinking skills, aligns with the goals of science and health courses, improves knowledge retention and application, and develops students as professional practitioners. The book provides readers with models and guidance on everything they need to know about team formation and maintenance, peer feedback and evaluation processes, and facilitation. It also includes a directory of tools and resources.

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.”

Shelia Tobias, They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different
In an effort to disentangle the many variables that account for failure and/or unwillingness of large numbers of college students to pursue mathematics and science, Sheila Tobias has engaged otherwise successful outsiders in a series of experiments across disciplinary boundaries. Her findings — that barriers to learning are the result of “disciplinary cultures” — puts students’ “failure to thrive” in mathematics and science in an entirely new and different light.

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

Back to Top

Teaching with Technology

Jose Antonio Bowen, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
Technology is profoundly changing education. 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. Teaching Naked shows 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. Jose Bowen introduces a new way to think about learning and technology that prioritizes the benefits of the human dimension in education. Here he offers practical advice for faculty and administrators on how to engage students with new technology, while restructuring classes into more active learning environments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back to Top

Teaching Writing

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.

John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2nd 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.

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.

Rebecca Moore Howard, Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators
This book argues that through binary privileging of the “real” author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles.

Back to Top