Category: Pedagogy

10 Best Books for College Teachers Update

Now that the year is coming to a close, it’s time to pick up where my previous recommendations for books for college teachers left off. In alphabetical order, we have:

  1. The Spark of Learning by Sarah Rose Cavanagh: I’ve written about this book five times because I keep returning to
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“When we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

When I was deciding whether to come back to teach one more year, I realized that the part that I like best is not giving information, it’s getting questions – especially questions that I have never explored before with students. This week, my last first week of the school year, … Read More

“What would happen if one conceptualized a social system as a system of energy?”

Here’s a radical idea: The primary responsibility of teachers and leaders is not to issue orders; it’s to release the energy of the people and manage the processes for using that energy to achieve goals. This idea was ahead of its time when Malcolm Knowles published it in 1983. It … Read More

“Black children continue to be unconsciously trained to correlate blackness with wrongness and whiteness with rightness.”

Let’s start with this idea: linguists do not designate any language as being superior.  And yet, when I teach my students to write academic essays in “standard” English, I am in fact telling them what language I believe is superior.  Baker-Bell argues that “standard” English is a construct created by … Read More

“Resistance is not about laziness, lack of will power, or the failure of intellect and imagination.”

Instead, it’s about neurology and psychology, Rosanne Bane argues in her book about the resistance that nearly all writers experience at some point. She explains what happens in our brains when we have trouble writing. As a writing teacher, I have been experimenting with ways to support the writing process … Read More

“Some people hold the view that if you are a learned scholar in a field, that should be enough to make you a good teacher.”

We all know this isn’t true. Is there a person alive who hasn’t suffered through a class taught by an expert who was boring? And yet, it seems to me that we are reluctant to acknowledge that “emotion” can support or suppress learning. We focus on covering the material instead … Read More

“We unite in the same dissonance: the need to produce effective writing, yet the failure to attain it by willpower alone.”

Ah, willpower!  Nearly everyone jumps to the conclusion that difficulty in writing has one root cause: a lack of willpower. It is easier to fall into the trap of blaming oneself than it is to consider another possibility: things are harder to do when you are out of practice. This … Read More

Best 2020 Book Prescriptions

If 2020 was a great year for you, stop reading.  This blog post is not for you.  If, however, 2020 presented you with some real challenges, and you are looking for some prescriptions in the form of book recommendations, here we go:

Worst year ever? If you are wondering if … Read More

“We will not succeed in teaching today’s students unless we make a fundamental shift in our thinking: away from preventing distraction and toward cultivating attention.”

While reading James Lang’s newest guidebook for college teachers, I shared one of the ideas with my English 1 students: “Attention is a gift that students and professors give to each other.”  I asked them how their teachers cultivate and sustain their attention.  I got an earful – and their … Read More

“Instructional vitality is an essential part of satisfying and rewarding careers in academe.”

From the moment we start talking, even if they are aware of nothing else, our students can sense our level of vitality.  From my view on the front lines, I would say I’ve never seen it lower across the board among teachers. Faculty members are burned out, exhausted, and … Read More

“Accept your students with compassion while also holding to the evidence-based truth about race and racism.”

Controlling the tone of difficult conversations is never easy. And yet, it’s especially critical when helping  students gain new perspectives on race. Cyndi Kernahan cites research that shows that making students feel blamed or guilty only leads to backlash, not learning or attitude change (5). Rather than being confrontational, … Read More

“A better grading system would build in incentives for students to aim high, work hard, and do their best.”

Ever since I read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset five years ago, I have been looking for a new approach to grading.  I wanted to find a way to give grades that supported a growth mindset. I was looking for a method of giving feedback that led directly to improvement … Read More

Best Books of 2019: Five Favorites

Here are the five books I’ve recommended most frequently in 2019:

Novel: It appears that Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is on every “Best of 2019” list. What makes it so appealing? In addition to having likable, open-hearted characters in an interesting situation — which we can expect from Patchett … Read More

“How do I help these students transform themselves?”

David Gooblar – who teaches at the University of Iowa and writes a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education – has written the book that I wish existed when I started teaching. He tells us what he has learned about college-level teaching, as one who started with the goal … Read More

“The daily achievement of micro-goals here is key.”

How do you succeed in an environment that rewards intellectual achievement?  Get great ideas? Adequate funding?  Collaborative colleagues? The answer, according to Donald Hall, is not what you might think. He argues that success in academia depends on thinking strategically about how you spend every hour of your day. Hall … Read More