Resource Checkout

Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (1993) by Thomas A. Angelo (Author), K. Patricia Cross (Author)

This revised and greatly expanded edition of the 1988 handbook offers teachers at all levels of experience detailed, how-to advice on classroom assessment—from what it is and how it works to planning, implementing, and analyzing assessment projects. The authors illustrate their approach through twelve case studies that detail the real-life classroom experiences of teachers carrying out successful classroom assessment projects.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Course (2013) by L. Dee Fink (Author)

This edition addresses new research on how people learn, active learning, and student engagement; includes illustrative examples from online teaching; and reports on the effectiveness of Fink's time-tested model. Fink also explores recent changes in higher education nationally and internationally and offers more proven strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching.

Tapping into the knowledge, tools, and strategies in Creating Significant Learning Experiences empowers educators to creatively design courses that will result in significant learning for their students.

A Guide to Faculty Development (2010) by Kay J. Gillespie (Editor), Douglas L. Robertson (Editor), William H. Bergquist (Afterword)

Prepared under the auspices of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD), this thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded edition offers a fundamental resource for faculty developers, as well as for faculty and administrators interested in promoting and sustaining faculty development within their institutions. This essential book offers an introduction to the topic, includes twenty-three chapters by leading experts in the field, and provides the most relevant information on a range of faculty development topics including establishing and sustaining a faculty development program; the key issues of assessment, diversity, and technology; and faculty development across institutional types, career stages, and organizations.

Social Media for Educators: Strategies and Best Practices (2012) by Tanya Joosten (Author)

This is a down-to-earth resource filled with strategies for designing learning activities that work toward specific outcomes. It illustrates the ways in which social media will improve learning and contains case studies that clearly demonstrate social media's ability to:

• Increase communication and interactivity in a course.
• Facilitate engaging learning activities.
• Enhance students' satisfaction, learning, and performance.

Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (2009) by Elizabeth F. Barkley (Author)

Keeping students involved, motivated, and actively learning is challenging educators across the country, yet good advice on how to accomplish this has not been readily available. 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. The ready-to-use format shows how to apply each of the book's techniques in the classroom and includes purpose, preparation, procedures, examples, online implementation, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources.

ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment (2010) by Darren Cambridge (Author)

In this book, Darren Cambridge shows how electronic portfolios provide a means for colleges and universities to help both adult and traditional college-age students at all levels articulate their identities in a manner that reflects their own values and is coherent over time, equipping these students to put that self-understanding to work in their communities and the world.

Showing how e-portfolios can be used in programmatic and institutional assessment, the book emphasizes the importance of taking advantage of the distinctive characteristics of e-portfolios, which combine reflection with diverse evidence, as opposed to more limited forms of assessment that consider individual samples of work in isolation from their contexts. Cambridge suggests future directions for higher education institutions committed to integrating curriculum, assessment, and technology.

A Guide to Online Course Design: Strategies for Student Success (2014) by Tina Stavredes (Author), Tiffany Herder (Author)

This book offers a much-needed resource for faculty and professional staff to build quality online courses by focusing on quality standards in instructional design and transparency in learning outcomes in the design of online courses. It includes effective instructional strategies to motivate online learners, help them become more self-directed, and develop academic skills to persist and successfully complete a program of study online. It also includes a more in-depth understanding of instructional design principles to support faculty as they move their face-to-face courses to the online environment.

Excellent Online Teaching: Effective Strategies For A Successful Semester Online (2013) by Aaron Johnson (Author)

Drawing on nearly a decade of teaching online, and many years working as a technical advisor and faculty developer in higher education, author Aaron Johnson will walk you through sixteen distinct characteristics of excellent online teaching. What you'll learn: - Strategies for connecting with your students - Effective ways to save time in grading - Ways to give your students meaningful feedback - How to communicate effectively in the online environment - How to begin and end your course with excellence - How to effectively facilitate online discussion Preview the table of contents for more Excellent Online Teaching also has a companion website with resources for each chapter.

Promoting Active Learning: Strategies for the College Classroom (1993) by Chet Meyers (Author), Thomas B. Jones (Author)

Gives an abundance of practical advice on how active learning techniques can be used by teachers across the disciplines. Using real-life examples, the authors discuss how various small-group exercises, simulations, and case studies can be blended with the technological and human resources available outside the classroom.

The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development (2011) by Rena M. Palloff (Author), Keith Pratt (Author)

The Excellent Online Instructor is a guide for new and seasoned faculty who teach online, those responsible for training and developing online instructors, and administrators who must evaluate online faculty performance. This comprehensive resource describes the qualities of and explains how one can become an excellent online instructor. Written by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt—noted experts in online instruction—the book:

• Includes models based in adult learning principles and best practices.
• Offers guidelines to test instructors' readiness to teach online.
• Contains ideas for overcoming faculty resistance.
• Reveals how to develop an effective mentoring program.
• Shows how to establish a long-term faculty development effort.

Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (New Pedagogies and Practices for Teaching in Higher Education) (2010) by Barbara Millis (Editor), James Rhem (Foreword)

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.

Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors (2010) by Linda B. Nilson (Author)

This third edition of the best-selling handbook offers faculty at all levels an essential toolbox of hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises, all of which can be implemented immediately. This thoroughly revised edition includes the newest portrait of the Millennial student; current research from cognitive psychology; a focus on outcomes maps; the latest legal options on copyright issues; and how to best use new technology including wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, and clickers. Entirely new chapters include subjects such as matching teaching methods with learning outcomes, inquiry-guided learning, and using visuals to teach, and new sections address Felder and Silverman's Index of Learning Styles, SCALE-UP classrooms, multiple true-false test items, and much more.

What the Best College Teachers Do (2004) by Ken Bain (Author)

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators.

The short answer is it's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out--but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (2007)

The Courage to Teach builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique but is rooted in the identity and integrity of the teacher. Good teaching takes myriad forms but good teachers share one trait: they are authentically present in the classroom, deeply connected with their students and their subject. These connections are held in the teacher's heart—the place where intellect, emotion, spirit, and converge in the human self. Good teachers weave a life-giving web between themselves, their subjects, and their students, helping their students learn how to weave a world for themselves.

How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010) by Susan A. Ambrose (Author), Michael W. Bridges (Author), Michele DiPietro (Author), Marsha C. Lovett (Author), Marie K. Norman (Author)

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. These principles provide instructors with an understanding of student learning that can help them see why certain teaching approaches are or are not supporting student learning, generate or refine teaching approaches and strategies that more effectively foster student learning in specific contexts, and transfer and apply these principles to new courses.

For anyone who wants to improve his or her students' learning, it is crucial to understand how that learning works and how to best foster it. This vital resource is grounded in learning theory and based on research evidence, while being easy to understand and apply to college teaching.

Engaging Students through Social Media: Evidence-Based Practices for Use in Student Affairs (2014) by Reynol Junco (Author)

Engaging Students through Social Media outlines a research-based and practical plan for implementing effective social media strategies within higher education settings. This groundbreaking book reveals how social media is already being used in effective ways across disciplines and how it can best be used to meet the goals of student affairs professionals.

As the author explains, the benefits of social media engagement include a wealth of positive outcomes such as improvements in critical thinking skills, content knowledge, diversity appreciation, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, community engagement, and student persistence. Based on Junco’s extensive research and that of established scholars in the field, the book dispels commonly held myths about the effects of social media on students and explores how to successfully integrate social media into both formal and informal learning environments, offering evidence-based practices that can be applied to any educator’s curricular development process.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007) by Chip Heath (Author), Dan Heath (Author)

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits.

Designing Group-work: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom, (2014) by Elizabeth G. Cohen (Author), Rachel A. Lotan (Author)

As teachers today work in ever more challenging contexts, group-work remains a particularly effective pedagogical strategy. Based on years of research and teaching experience, the new edition of this popular book features significant updates on the successful use of cooperative learning to build equitable classrooms. Designing Group-work, Third Edition incorporates current research findings with new material on what makes for a group-worthy task, and shows how group-work contributes to growth and development in the language of instruction. Responding to new curriculum standards and assessments across all grade levels and subject areas, this edition shows teachers how to organize their classroom so that all students participate actively. This valuable and sensible resource is essential reading for educators at both the elementary and secondary levels, for teachers in training, and for anyone working in the field of education.

Adding Some TEC-VARIETY: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners Online (2014)

At this very moment, tens of millions of learners around the planet are navigating through seemingly endless pages of their online courses. Unfortunately, most of these learners are swimming in this sea of content without much hope for interaction, collaboration, or engagement. The emergence of massive open online courses or MOOCs with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of learners in a single course has made the present situation even more prominent and precarious. We propose the TEC-VARIETY framework as a solution to the lack of meaningful engagement. It can shift learners from highly comatose states to extremely engaged ones. Adding some TEC-VARIETY helps instructors to focus on how to motivate online learners and increase learner retention. It also is a comprehensive, one stop toolkit for online instructors to inspire learners and renew their own passion for teaching. Using ten theoretically-driven and proven motivational principles, TEC-VARIETY offers over a 100 practical yet innovative ideas based on decades of author experience teaching in a variety of educational settings.