Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors (Third Edition)

Teaching at Its Best: a Research-Based Resource for College Instructors (Third Edition)By: Linda B. Nilson - Copyright: 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.This third edition offers hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises that are suitable for all levels of college instructors. It covers the newest portrait of the Millennial student, some research related to cognitive psychology, an emphasis on outcomes maps, some new legal options on copyright issues, and finally, the best ways, through which new technology such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, and clickers are used. The following is a brief review of the different parts of this book.Part one, "Laying the Groundwork for Student Learning", is concerned with completing the tasks before the term starts. It consists of five chapters. Chapter one deals with understanding your students and how they learn. So, it tries to use a lot of principles and findings from cognitive psychology and show their implications for teaching. After that, it puts emphasis on the importance of mental structure in learning, retention, and retrieval. Finally, it goes towards reaching and teaching the millennial generation. Chapter Two is concerned with outcomes-centered course design based on Bloom's taxonomy and Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy. Chapter Three's title is the Complete Syllabus. First, it provides you with a list of all the information that you should put in a course syllabus. Then, it introduces the graphic syllabus and the online living syllabus, and after that, it focuses on how to get students to read your syllabus. Chapter Four introduces pre-class physical and vocal exercises for enhancing your persona and nonverbal communication. Chapter Five deals with motivation and its four theories. It offers the strategies, through which you can motivate students. Furthermore, the last part of this chapter suggests many ways to create productive learning situations in different places.Part two, "Managing Your Courses", puts emphasis on administrative aspect of teaching. Chapters Six, Seven, Eight and Nine deal with copyright guidelines for instructors, preventing and responding to classroom incivility, preserving academic integrity and making the most of office hours, respectively. All of the material on copyright is up-to-date, and the chapter on academic integrity includes the latest incidence and prevalence statistics, addresses electronic forms of cheating, and examines the prospect of changing students' values. Many new ideas concerning places and settings for office hours are covered in Chapter Nine. Chapter Ten provides new literature on the faculty-teaching assistant relationship.Part Three, "Choosing and Using the Right Tools for Teaching and Learning", starts with Chapter Eleven dealing with matching teaching methods, with learning outcomes. Here, the teaching formats, methods, and moves that are known to students are introduced to help them get specific cognitive results. Chapters Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen describe practical instructional methods and present basic principles for establishing and managing them to make sure strong learning experiences are achieved. On the whole, they cover many new topics: using clickers (personal response system or classroom response system) to have a lecture with interactive learning values; teaching and motivating students to take good lecture notes; promoting polite remarks and controlling conflict during discussions; using a question model to advance discussion considering Bloom's hierarchy; posing Brookfield and Presidir s "momentum" questions; applying academic games; planning and reviewing your own simulations; making students familiar with small-group patterns; combining group processing and self -assessment into group work; and attending to the organization or implementation of group tests.Part Four, "More Tools: Teaching Real- World Problem Solving", emphasize fundamental methods that are of great help in making students acquire various problem solving skills for different purposes, such as resolving the sort of open-ended realistic problems that good cases and problem-based learning present, solving closed-ended quantitative problems, and tackling challenging scientific questions in both lectures and labs. …