LibGuides: Teaching & Learning: Books & eBooks

Featured eBooks

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Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy Research has identified cooperative learning as one of the ten High Impact Practices that improve student learning. If you've been interested in cooperative learning, but wondered how it would work in your discipline, this book provides the necessary theory, and a wide range of concrete examples. Experienced users of cooperative learning demonstrate how they use it in settings as varied as a developmental mathematics course at a community college, and graduate courses in history and the sciences, and how it works in small and large classes, as well as in hybrid and online environments. The authors describe the application of cooperative learning in biology, economics, educational psychology, financial accounting, general chemistry, and literature at remedial, introductory, and graduate levels. The chapters showcase cooperative learning in action, at the same time introducing the reader to major principles such as individual accountability, positive interdependence, heterogeneous teams, group processing, and social or leadership skills. The authors build upon, and cross-reference, each others' chapters, describing particular methods and activities in detail. They explain how and why they may differ about specific practices while exemplifying reflective approaches to teaching that never fail to address important assessment issues.
Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses Dee Fink poses a fundamental question for all teachers: "How can I create courses that will provide significant learning experiences for my students?" In the process of addressing this question, he urges teachers to shift from a content-centered approach to a learning-centered approach that asks "What kinds of learning will be significant for students, and how can I create a course that will result in that kind of learning?" Fink provides several conceptual and procedural tools that will be invaluable for all teachers when designing instruction. He 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. Acquiring a deeper understanding of the design process will empower teachers to creatively design courses for significant learning in a variety of situations.
The Effective Teacher: Theory and Research on Instructors' Motivation in Higher Education
Enhancing University Teaching: Lessons From Research Into Award-Winning Teachers Written by experts in the field, this book aims to provide an alternative approach to quality teaching in higher education by deriving a model of good university teaching from the academics which universities have chosen as their best teachers. Award-winning teachers outline their beliefs and practices as a teacher, covering key topics including: assessment, motivating students, planning courses and lessons teaching large classes, reflection and feedback managing, discussion and group work. Illustrated with extracts from interviews with the award-winning teachers, and packed with activities and further reading, this textbook provides a set of principles for good teaching internationally.
Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning Mike Schmoker describes a plan for radically improving student learning that is built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum; clear, prioritized lessons; and purposeful reading and writing.
Increasing Student Engagement and Retention Using Mobile Applications: Smartphones, Skype and Texting Technologies Increasing Student Engagement and Retention Using Mobile Applications: Smartphones, Skype and Texting Technologies examines new research on how mobile technologies are being used in higher education to increase learner engagement in an epoch of increasing globalization and diversity. These enabling technologies are reshaping and reframing the practice of teaching and learning in higher education. Through case studies, surveys, and literature reviews, this volume will examine how mobile technologies are being used to improve teamwork and leadership skills in students, to create engaging communities of practice, and how these technologies are being used to create inter-cultural and global experiences. This volume will also discuss frameworks for adopting and deploying these technologies.
Instructional Design: Case Studies in Communities of Practice Instructional designers hold the responsibility of selecting, sequencing, synthesizing, and summarizing unfamiliar content to subject matter experts. To successfully achieve legitimate participation in communities of practice, instructional designers need to utilize a number of communication strategies to optimize the interaction with the subject matter expert. Instructional Design: Case Studies in Communities of Practice documents real-world experiences of instructional designers and staff developers who work in communities of practice. Instructional Design: Case Studies in Communities of Practice explains the strategies and heuristics used by instructional designers when working in different settings, articulates the sophistication of communication strategies when working with subject matter experts, and provides insight into the range of knowledge, skills, and personal characteristics required to complete the tasks expected of them.
The Lecturer's Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Learning, Teaching & Assessment The Lecturer's Toolkit is the primary resource for all teachers in higher education, whatever their experience, who are seeking to improve their teaching skills. Developed around detailed, practical guidance on the core elements of effective teaching in HE, it is packed full of accessible advice and helpful tips. This fully updated edition covers key topics including: learning styles assessment, lecturing, personal management skills, formative feedback, large and small group teaching, blended learnin,g resource based and online learning, peer observation of teaching. The Lecturer's Toolkit is essential for anyone working towards a profesisonal qualification in teaching in higher education as well as for those who want to reflect on and develop existing skills.
The Other Side of Pedagogy: Lacan's Four Discourses and the Development of the Student Writer Delineates Lacan's theory of the four discourses as a practical framework through which faculty can reflect on where their students are, developmentally, and where they might go.
The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson This book is packed with reliable, high-impact, flexible strategies for teaching and learning that are grounded in research and suitable for teachers at any level. The authors also explain how teachers can use an innovative visual profile to better plan for different teaching and learning styles in their classrooms.
Teaching Undergraduates This practical guide is designed to help college teachers plan their undergraduate courses and deliver high-quality instruction. The book's theme is that teaching is a creative, decision-making, idea-testing enterprise whose purpose is to facilitate student learning in all of its facets. Its goal is to help instructors understand the multiple kinds of learning taking place in their courses so that they can select, devise, evaluate, and modify teaching techniques to improve their effectiveness. Based on research on human learning, memory, thinking, and problem solving, as well as studies of teaching and less-formal reports of teaching practices, the book offers concrete advice about all aspects of college teaching. Part I is devoted to course planning. It outlines the many decisions instructors face in defining a course as their own and discusses the larger issues that shape a course and constrain some specific choices. Selecting course content, choosing learning goals, deciding how to pace a course, and scheduling tests are some of these issues. A workable timetable for preparing a course is included. Part II is a mini-course on human learning, memory, and thinking. It provides the conceptual foundation for making teaching decisions, for selecting instructional strategies, and especially for inventing new techniques that might particularly fit a specific course. Part III deals with the "nitty-gritty" of college teaching, including how to choose a textbook; lecturing and conducting classroom discussions; types and purposes of writing assignments, and how to structure and evaluate them; dealing with plagiarism; strengths and weaknesses of different types of tests, the relation of tests to learning goals, and guidelines for constructing good tests; and grading systems. Part IV addresses professional and ethical issues of importance and consequence to instructors. New college instructors, more experienced faculty who would like to reflect on their teaching practices and consider making some changes, and teaching assistants will all find this book relevant and useful.

Featured Print Books

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Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses In this thoroughly updated edition of L. Dee Fink's bestselling classic, he discusses new research on how people learn, active learning, and the effectiveness of his popular model; adds more examples from online teaching; and further focuses on the impact of student engagement on student learning. The book explores the changes in higher education nationally and internationally since the publication of the previous edition, includes additional procedures for integrating one's course, and adds strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching. This edition continues to provide conceptual and procedural tools that are invaluable for all teachers when designing instruction. It shows how to use a taxonomy of significant learning and systematically combine the best research-based practices for learning-centered teaching with a teaching strategy in a way that results in powerful learning experiences for students. Acquiring a deeper understanding of the design process will empower teachers to creatively design courses that will result in significant learning for students.
Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind Practical "brain-aware" facilitation tailored to the adult brain. Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind explains how the brain works, and how to help adults learn, develop, and perform more effectively in various settings. Recent neurobiological discoveries have challenged long-held assumptions that logical, rational thought is the preeminent approach to knowing. Rather, feelings and emotions are essential for meaningful learning to occur in the embodied brain. Using stories, metaphors, and engaging illustrations to illuminate technical ideas, Taylor and Marienau synthesize relevant trends in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. Readers unfamiliar with current brain discoveries will enjoy an informative, easy-to-read book. Neuroscience fans will find additional material designed to supplement their knowledge. Many popular publications on brain and learning focus on school-aged learners or tend more toward anatomical description than practical application. This book provides facilitators of adult learning and development a much-needed resource of tested approaches plus the science behind their effectiveness. Appreciate the fundamental role of experience in adult learning. Understand how metaphor and analogy spark curiosity and creativity. Alleviate adult anxieties that impede learning. Acquire tools and approaches that foster adult learning and development. Compared with other books on brain and learning, this volume includes dozens of specific examples of how experienced practitioners facilitate meaningful learning. These "brain-aware" approaches can be adopted and adapted for use in diverse settings. Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind should be read by advisors/counselors, instructors, curriculum and instructional developers, professional development designers, corporate trainers and coaches, faculty mentors, and graduate students--in fact, anyone interested in how adult brains learn.
A Guide to Better Teaching Skills, Advice, and Evaluation for College and University Professors A Guide to Better Teaching is a self-help book that provides anyone teaching a college course with a thorough understanding of what it takes to be an effective teacher. Derived from the authors' extensive research, several interactive assessment tools are included that measure levels of effectiveness according to learner preferences. Each chapter is filled with detailed explanations, relevant stories, and action-driven tables that help them in understanding and applying skills. This book aims to enhance teaching skills by offering critical perspectives, practical suggestions, and techniques for improvement. Whether a new teacher, an adjunct faculty, or a seasoned professor, this comprehensive information can be used to analyze effectiveness or the effectiveness of others. The suggestions and the assessment tools are applicable to the entire spectrum of organizational leaders and managers, in education, government or industry whose work requires giving presentations or communicating in a public forum.
Learner-Centered Innovation: Spark Curiosity, Ignite Passion and Unleash Genius What if education could be better--for students and for educators? Our changing world demands creative thinkers and collaborative problem solvers, but too often, schools stifle growth and discovery in favor of getting through the curriculum or preparing for "the test." Learning opportunities and teaching methods must evolve to match the ever-changing needs of today's learners. When we tell kids to complete an assignment, we get compliance. When we empower learners to explore and learn how to make an impact on the world, we inspire problem solvers and innovators. This required change in education involves more than providing training for administrators and teachers to implement new curriculum or programs and resources; it demands that we, as teachers and leaders, create an environment where learners at every level are empowered to take risks in pursuit of learning and growth rather than perfection. This book is for you if you are wondering: What if learners were valued for their diverse talents and not just our traditional model of "smart"? What if I could create new and better experiences for those I serve? What if I could inspire students to learn, to discover their passions, and to share their ideas with the world?
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 discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student After more than fifteen years of teaching, Rebekah Nathan, a professor of anthropology at a large state university, realized that she no longer understood the behavior and attitudes of her students. Fewer and fewer participated in class discussion, tackled the assigned reading, or came to discuss problems during office hours. And she realized from conversations with her colleagues that they, too, were perplexed: Why were students today so different and so hard to teach? Were they, in fact, more likely to cheat, ruder, and less motivated? Did they care at all about their education, besides their grades? Nathan decided to put her wealth of experience in overseas ethnographic fieldwork to use closer to home and apply to her own university. Accepted on the strength of her high school transcript, she took a sabbatical and enrolled as a freshman for the academic year. She immersed herself in student life, moving into the dorms and taking on a full course load. She ate in the student cafeteria, joined student clubs, and played regular pick-up games of volleyball and tag football (sports at which the athletic fifty-something-year-old could hold her own). Nathan had resolved that, if asked, she would not lie about her identity; she found that her classmates, if they were curious about why she was attending college at her age, never questioned her about her personal life. Based on her interviews and conversations with fellow classmates, her interactions with professors and with other university employees and offices, and her careful day-to-day observations, My Freshman Year provides a compelling account of college life that should be read by students, parents, professors, university administrators, and anyone else concerned about the state of higher education in America today. Placing her own experiences and those of her classmates into a broader context drawn from national surveys of college life, Nathan finds that today's students face new challenges to which academic institutions have not adapted. At the end of her freshman year, she has an affection and respect for students as a whole that she had previously reserved only for certain individuals. Being a student, she discovers, is hard work. But she also identifies fundamental misperceptions, misunderstandings, and mistakes on both sides of the educational divide that negatively affect the college experience. By focusing on the actual experiences of students, My Freshman Year offers a refreshing alternative to the frequently divisive debates surrounding the political, economic, and cultural significance of higher education--as well as a novel perspective from which to look at the achievements and difficulties confronting America's colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.
Personal & Authentic: Designing Learning Experiences that Impact a Lifetime As an educator, you have the power to leave a legacy by making students' learning experiences personal and authentic; ensuring that the culture around you is personal and authentic; developing and nurturing personal and authentic relationships; being personal and authentic. In Personal & Authentic, Thomas C. Murray reveals the power of designing awe-inspiring experiences that are grounded in relationships and learner-centered by design. Inherently relevant and contextualized, it is this kind of learning that lasts a lifetime. Be bold. Be fearless. Be proud. Be you. Your story is not finished yet.
The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) Historically, we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry, staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The field of education, however, is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning, informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience. In friendly, readable prose, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that if you as an educator want to capture your students' attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. To make this argument, she brings to bear a wide range of evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience, and she provides practical examples of successful classroom activities from a variety of disciplines in secondary and higher education.
Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students Your students aren't reading. They aren't engaged in class. Getting them to talk is like pulling teeth. Whatever the situation, your reality is not meeting your expectations. Change is needed. But who's got the time? Or maybe you're just starting out, and you want to get it right the first time. If so, Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students is the blueprint. Written for early career instructors, this easy-to-implement guide teaches you to: Think like advertisers to understand your target audience-your students; Adopt the active learning approach of the best K-12 teachers; Write a syllabus that gets noticed and read; Develop lessons that stimulate deep engagement; Create slide presentations that students can digest; Get students to do the readings, participate more, and care about your course. Secrets like "focusing on students, not content" and building a "customer" profile of the class will change the way you teach. The author, Dr. Norman Eng, argues that much of these approaches and techniques have been effectively used in marketing and K-12 education, two industries that could greatly improve how college instructors teach. Find out how to hack the world of college classrooms and have your course become the standard by which all other courses will be measured against. Whether you are an adjunct, a lecturer, an assistant professor, or even a graduate assistant, pedagogical success is within your grasp.
Teaching Online: A Practical Guide Teaching Online: A Practical Guide is a practical, concise guide for educators teaching online. This updated edition has been fully revamped and reflects important changes that have occurred since the second edition's publication. A leader in the online field, this best- selling resource maintains its reader friendly tone and offers exceptional practical advice, new teaching examples, faculty interviews, and an updated resource section. New to this edition: new chapter on how faculty and instructional designers can work collaboratively; expanded chapter on Open Educational Resources, copyright, and intellectual property; more international relevance, with global examples and interviews with faculty in a wide variety of regions new; interactive Companion Website that invites readers to post questions to the author, offers real-life case studies submitted by users, and includes an updated, online version of the resource section. Focusing on the "how" and "whys" of implementation rather than theory, this text is a must-have resource for anyone teaching online or for students enrolled in Distance Learning and Educational Technology Masters Programs.