Some Summer Reading from Teaching Thursday

Anne Kelsch, Office of Instructional Development, University of North Dakota

I love summer! One of the great joys of academia is the change in routine and responsibilities as the spring semester wraps up. For many of us it means a more livable pace and the opportunity to catch up on tasks that get set to the side in the triage process that governs daily schedules during the regular school year. Like me, many of you probably take the opportunity to read books that you just ordinarily wouldn’t get to. So I’d like to suggest a rather eclectic mix of teaching related books to add to your list.

Teaching What You Don’t Know by Therese Huston (Harvard University Press, 2009).

OID offered a Faculty Study Seminar on this book in the spring semester. Our study group quickly concluded that not only did this book help those of us traumatized by having been asked to teach something way outside our expertise (as a European Social historian teaching American business history was stressful for me!), it really was a cleverly packaged argument for employing strategies that will improve your teaching overall. The book is a fun, quick read that offers practical strategies that can decrease your stress level and enhance student learning regardless of the subject matter you are teaching.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses by Dee Fink (Jossey-Bass, 2003).
Dee Fink’s philosophical and practical approach to course design is based on the premise that teaching should lead others to conclude “‘That [the] learning experience resulted in something that is truly significant in terms of the students’ lives’” (p. 4). This book offers faculty a way to look at their courses, structure them in terms of the knowledge and skills they see as most significant, and create learning experiences that help students achieve those course objectives. If you are taking time this summer to design a new course, redesign an old one or get a broader look at student learning across your curriculum, this book provides the tools to think about and create useful change.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007).

Many teachers struggle with how to communicate ideas effectively to students (and colleagues) and how to get those ideas to make a difference: an unnamed history professor spends fifty minutes explaining social construction, and a week later only six students remember it!  Based on a class at Stanford taught by one of the authors, this book examines why some ideas “stick” in our minds while the majority fall by the wayside.  Ever wondered why urban legends, conspiracy theories, and annoying television ads have intrinsic “stickiness”? The Heath brothers argue that understanding such phenomenon can help us better communicate with classes and colleagues.  Drawing on the work of psychologists, education researchers, and political scientists, they identify six traits they think all great ideas have in common. If you are interested in a brief version, the authors have posted “Teaching that Sticks” online.

Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean (Jossey-Bass, 1996).

Bean designed Engaging Ideas as a nuts-and-bolts handbook for instructors who want to successfully integrate writing into their courses. Bean explains the fundamental link between critical thinking and writing in the classroom, and provides several strategies for addressing these learning outcomes. He writes, “The goal of these activities is to transform students from passive to active learners, deepening their understanding of subject matter while helping them learn the thinking process of the discipline: how members of the discipline ask questions, conduct inquiries, gather and analyze data and make arguments.” This book is a great starting place for faculty interested in practical advice on how to develop writing and critical thinking successfully in the classroom.

Tools for Teaching 2^nd. ed., by Barbara Gross Davis (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

If you like sourcebooks of practical tips and tricks, this is a great one to have on your shelf. With over sixty pragmatic, accessible chapters designed to improve teaching, this bestselling book covers traditional issues that teachers confront (such as syllabus design and the best use of the first day of class) to more recently relevant issues including inclusion and technology in education. If your book budget is getting low, some chapters from the first edition (1993) are available online, including Diversity and Complexity in the Classroom: Considerations of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, Grading Practices and Motivating Students .

The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve edited by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George (University of Illinois Press, 1998).

As Coiner and George observe, we work in a time when “the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper of the lives of those it employs.” And as we all know from personal experience, the challenges and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other personal relationships are great. Faculty from across institutions and disciplines contributed personal histories and interviews to this edited collection which also features critical essays on a variety of pertinent subjects. This is a classic, often referenced work.

Helping Faculty Find Work-Life Balance: The Path Toward Family-Friendly Institutions by Maike Philipsen and Timothy Bostic (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

Philipsen and Bostic look at how academics juggle the demands of their personal and professional life, and how specific challenges shift over the years of an academic career. Topics covered include the changing workplace, roles and rewards, tenure, the division of labor at home, spousal/partner hiring policies, changing definitions of fatherhood, coping, and what exemplary institutional are doing to reform the system. I confess I haven’t read this book yet, but I am always interested in books on balancing work and life (an issue many academics struggle with), and I have had a number of people recommend it as worthwhile. OID will run a Faculty Study Seminar on Helping Faculty Find Work-Life Balance this fall, so if you can’t get to it this summer, you can join us then.

You also need to do some reading for fun and with the following you can argue they are career related:

Death in a Tenured Position (1981) and other books by Amanda Cross. Amanda Cross is the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a retired Columbia University English professor. Her heroine, Kate Fansler, is a tenured professor of English who investigates crimes that occur in higher education settings. As Amanda Cross, Carolyn Heilbrun won the Nero Wolfe Award in 1981 for Death in a Tenured Position, and garnered much critical acclaim for her work. Warning: you may recognize some vaguely familiar characters in her books.

Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection (2002); Life is tough and then you graduate: The second Piled Higher and Deeper Comic Strip Collection (2005)

Scooped! The Third Piled Higher and Deeper Comic Strip Collection (2007) and Academic Stimulus Package (2009) all by Jorge Cham.

Jorge Cham started his Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip when he was a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical-engineering at Stanford. The strip, which explores life in academia, originally appeared in Stanford’s student newspaper and has been featured in the journal Nature (“Use this comic for procrastination or decompression, as you see fit”) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (“hilarious.”) Piled Higher and Deeper is available online, but to quote the author’s rationale for buying the books: “They make great gifts for your friends and family (‘See? this is what I go through!’)”

Last but not least, I have to include a few completely non-academic books for pure pleasure. The most absorbing books I read this year were the first two volumes of the bestselling Millennium Series — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and The Girl Who Played with Fire (2007) — by Stieg Larsson. If you are one of the very few people who haven’t heard of Larsson, he was a Swedish investigative journalist who died at age 50 in 2004. The series was published posthumously and the story of the books’ publication and adaptation for film is almost as intriguing as the novels. These are complex, intelligent and edgy thrillers. I just got the last volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010) yesterday and I can’t wait to read it. A reviewer for The Observer give an accurate glimpse of the author’s approach, pointing out that Larsson’s “favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away …” in Swedish society. While it maybe hard to imagine all of that coming together as entertaining summer reading, Larsson pulled it off.

Happy reading!