Teaching books seem to try to cover several kinds of advice: procedural/administrative (how to organize a syllabus, deal with grade disputes, etc.), checklists/best practices (have a detailed rubric for your exam, don’t forget to inquire about institutional policies like cheating and late homeworks, etc.), and pedagogical (things to do to maximize learning).

Here are mini-reviews of five short books (<200 pages) claiming to prepare and/or motivate new instructors to do a great job. Some are clearly focused on one kind of advice, others mix them up.

In addition to trying to contextualize each one, I also tried to view it through the lens of Large-Enrollment CS Instructors (LECSIs), since that is the audience I know best. Some of the items I identify as “missing for LECSIs” or “noteworthy for LECSIs” may also be missing/noteworthy to other constituents.

I’m left with the following open questions:

The five books reviewed here (with links to Amazon) are:

  1. Falk, E., Becoming a New Instructor: A Guide for College Adjuncts and Graduate Students
  2. Filene, P., The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors
  3. Wong, O., An Instructor Primer for Adjunct and New Faculty: Foundations for Career Success 1st Edition
  4. Lambert, L., S. Tice, P. Featherstone, eds., University Teaching: a Guide for Graduate Students
  5. Weimer, E., Improving your Classroom Teaching: Survival Skills for Scholars

Becoming a New Instructor: A Guide for College Adjuncts and Graduate Students

By Erika Falk, Director of MA program in Communications at Johns Hopkins.

Executive summary: The tone of the book is a no-nonsense, get-down-to-business checklist—how to plan a syllabus, get free examination copies of textbooks, find online services that detect plagiarism, etc. “Joy” didn’t make the page budget; as an adjunct, you can feel joy or nervousness later, but right now you have to prepare for the first lecture, which ohmygod is next week!

This 168-page book (114 without the appendices showing sample course syllabi and materials) started as a handbook for the author’s responsibilities in hiring and training adjuncts, so it’s particularly aimed at them. It’s a step-by-step guide to the mechanics of putting together and teaching a course as an adjunct—with chapters literally numbered “step 1” through “step 8”—so it assumes the new instructor isn’t familiar with the university’s culture/policies and has a number of sections reminding the instructor to ask their administrators (e.g. policies for dealing with students with disabilities, dealing with cheating, grade disputes, etc.)

There is a good deal of non-obvious practical advice: “Return exams/assignments at the end of class rather than beginning, so that if students have an emotional reaction to their grade, it doesn’t impede their learning during class.”

What’s missing: 

Noteworthy: a chapter on teaching online (“plan to spend twice as much time preparing for an online course as a traditional one”), and callouts in other chapters noting concerns specific to online teachers on that topic. For example, in the discussion about “grading on participation”, in online courses live discussions are replaced by discussion forums, so you might grade “participation” in an online course by counting the number of posts a student makes.

There are references to the literature to support statements such as “Lecture is as effective as any other method of transmitting knowledge, but less effective if the goal is to promote thought, teach values, or inspire interest.” There are also callouts with references for topics such as “the importance of taking notes,” “the effect of laptop use in the classroom” (TL;DR: don’t allow it), and so on. Most such references are relatively recent (last 15 years or so) and point to published papers or other respectable books.

Useful for professors? While as an experienced instructor I’m not sure I learned anything new, it is a pretty comprehensive “checklist” for new instructors (if not a particularly inspiring or joyful one) and it’s hard to imagine it being more concise and still covering all these topics. Like Strunk & White, I’d probably find myself rereading it every once in awhile to refresh stuff I may have been forgetting to do.

Useful for TAs? There’s quite a bit in here that most TAs do not have to do, such as plan the syllabus, determine grading breakdown, etc. There is material on “classroom technique”—comportment, treating students with respect, presentation skills, etc.—but for TAs I would focus relatively more on those topics than this book does.

The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors

By Peter Filene, Prof. of History at UNC Chapel Hill; foreword by Ken Bain, author of What the best college teachers do

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Executive Summary: There is good advice here, and clear joy that is absent from Becoming…, but despite the title, the book isn’t “practical” because it isn’t tightly organized. The advice is scattered throughout the anecdotes and hard to extract compared to Becoming’s checklist-oriented approach. LECSIs may find it challenging to transfer some of the advice and ideas from the examples given, not one of which is STEM.  Specific important topics such as creating exam questions and rubrics are barely addressed at all.

The first sentence of the book is “Welcome to your first year of teaching.”  The attitudinal contrast to Becoming a New Instructor is immediately evident: 

The impatient may therefore find themselves skimming to find the practical nuggets, as compared to Becoming…,  in which every single word is associated with practical/how-to/checklist advice.

There is good advice here: 

All examples are drawn from nontechnical courses in which the goal is not imparting/practicing skills, but developing the students’ point of view on something. E.g. observing the student’s progression from “dualist” (just do what the professor says, see the world in black and white) to “relativist” (all points of view are equally valid) to “multiplicity” (some points of view are better-supported than others and perhaps more worthy of consideration). It’d be a stretch to apply this approach to, say, software development. Similarly, the examples given for “writing an effective course overview with learning outcomes” are based on course titles such as Post-colonial Literature in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, even though the advice they embody is generally good advice (avoid academic jargon, don’t “de-personalize” the description with bland phrases such as “this course seeks to develop…”, and so on).

There is a chapter “Teaching without Perishing” on how to balance the demands of research and teaching, and indeed whether it’s worth worrying about teaching for tenure purposes. The chapter laments the attitude at R-1 universities but doesn’t give any particular advice on what to do.

There is one long paragraph on technology, and it seems dated and underinformed. (“College students today have come of age with PowerPoint, the Web, DVDs, and VCRs”—find me a college student who knows what a VCR is—and makes reference to a “xeroxed syllabus”.) It would’ve been better to omit this topic entirely than to throw it this pathetic bone.

The index is brief, e.g. no entry for anxiety or nervousness or performance.

Missing: 

To oversimplify, I’d give Filene’s book to someone going into the Peace Corps but Falk’s book to someone going into the Army.

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An Instructor Primer for Adjunct and New Faculty: Foundations for Career Success, 1st Edition

By Ovid Wong, Assoc. Prof. of Education, Benedictine University, Illinois. 122 pages; no index

Executive summary: Read the self-check “reflection” questions at end of each chapter to get checklists comparable to those in Becoming. In between is material of highly-variable quality, supplemented with poorly-produced figures and graphs, and in a slightly schizoid voice that can’t quite decide what its tone should be. Missing content: comparable to Filene’s book, above.

This book is also heavily aimed at adjuncts, especially those doing it part-time as professionals (e.g. a finance professional teaching accounting courses as an adjunct) and especially on those working with adult learners (returning/continuing/part-time education), so there is discussion on the extent to which such learners’ goals align with such teachers’ methods (which is largely irrelevant for LECSIs).

This book hopes for joy, but does not presuppose it: ‘Some of you reading this book may be considering a career decision with questions like “Is teaching right for me?”  ”Do I want to be a college teacher?”  ”What is my next career move?”’ (Ed. note: I’d add “Do you want fries with that?”) Correspondingly, the first chapter is entirely about the financial and lifestyle “big picture” of being either a full-time or part-time postsecondary instructor, including median salaries, schools whose unions mandate benefits for adjuncts vs. not, the rewards vs. the lifestyle tradeoffs, and so on.

The advice overlaps with Becoming but it’s in prose rather than checklist form. You can see the lineage of Barbara Davis’s Tools for Teaching in some of the phrases (“A visit to the classroom before the first day of class is always helpful.”) While every chapter begins with anticipatory questions (“What are the rankings and responsibilities of professorship?”) and ends with a Summary and Reflection Questions, the material in between is of variable quality and often inflated by scenarios that add little, and the summary doesn’t always match the anticipatory questions. On the other hand, answering the reflection questions is a good way of cherry-picking the “checklist/concrete advice” parts of the material.

Weak production values and polish: Even basic Excel and PowerPoint skills would have yielded better looking figures. There is no index. Editorial and grammatical oversights abound; if it wasn’t worth someone’s time to edit, is it worth reading?

Noteworthy:

Weak spots:

The book lacks a consistent tone:

There is some material on authentic assessment and on different question types, but surprisingly, no quantitative suggestions or concrete research to hang it on. For example, what is the optimal number of distractors for multiple choice questions? What does it mean for an assessment to be valid and reliable? (Item-response theory answers these questions, and while most instructors might not be willing to learn the details of the theory, it seems strange to call out the importance of validity and reliability without mentioning even the existence of a quantitative way to measure them.)

Somewhat out of place is a section on “the three logics of instruction” (deductive, inductive, and abductive). I’m not sure why there would be a section on this but not (e.g.) a section on the construction of formal proofs.

Lambert, L., S. Tice, P. Featherstone, eds., University Teaching: a Guide for Graduate Students

A collection of 15 ten-page essays (on average; 15 chapters, 155 pages), all written by Syracuse U. faculty and grad students and edited by two of its faculty, as part of its Future Professoriate project launched 1991 (book published 1996). The F.P. program is “dedicated to preparing graduate students for academic careers by combining graduate study’s traditional emphasis on excellence in scholarship with opportunities for a discipline-based, advanced teaching apprenticeship (termed a teaching associateship) under the careful guidance of a faculty teaching mentor.”

Executive summary: A few of essays are full of useful, practical information, while others are vague; as they are all written by different authors, the book can’t speak with one voice, and there is significant repetition of some canonical good ideas across chapters, such as “Learn students’ names and know them as individuals”. The essays are written by actual profs and TAs in the trenches: 7 STEM/ECE, 3 education, 19 humanities/arts/social sciences.

The editors/authors acknowledge “other respected volumes of readings about teaching” (they don’t say which ones), but this book claims to choose topics based on ongoing “intellectually rigorous” conversations about teaching at Syracuse and to view “good teaching” as a set of skills that goes beyond classroom technique. The first point isn’t particularly evident in the reading and the second seems self-evident.

**Noteworthy practical advice in specific chapters that would be worth summarizing:**

The other chapters contain generally good advice, but are short on actionable suggestions for implementing the advice:

  1. Overall tips: see above
  2. Lecture: Generally good advice without concrete actionable suggestions: your lecture should demonstrate how the different levels of learning (recall, understand, apply) can come together. Maintain the right culture and decorum in lecture. Believe in your students, sometimes despite diversity of abilities. Stimulate active learning by asking questions. Organize lecture content into a thought process that the students can recognize as coherent. Energize your lecture. Be yourself. Vary your presentation techniques, try innovation.
  3. Discussion/recitation: This chapter is targeted squarely at grad TAs and written by two PoliSci grad students. Advice includes: Clarify expectations of autonomy and duties with prof; be aware of power issues; think about how to deal with problem students (disruptive, openly dismissive of you in front of their peers, etc); learn student names; think of activities that will engage students, both within and between meetings; elicit questions; get feedback from students on your performance. As with Lecture chapter, very little in the way of specific advice/how-tos is provided for achieving these noncontroversial goals.
  4. Studio (analogous to Open Lab Hours in CS setting?): focuses on peer-critiquing of assignments, which is the essence of “studio-based” learning. A bit specialized for a general course on effective teaching, since only a few disciplines have studio courses. Some generic advice on managing student conflicts and being consistent in your grading, especially in studio where there’s a significant subjective component.
  5. Lab: see above
  6. Office hours & tutoring: Shortest chapter—4 pages. Don’t reteach lecture; don’t grill the student—this discourages them from coming in with questions; if several students have same questions, consider addressing in a future recitation; beware of sensitivity/harassment issues, especially in 1:1 tutoring; schedule office hours at a variety of times, be on time, and be patient, sympathetic and supportive.
  7. Assessment:  “Classroom assessment stresses the improvement of learning rather than the improvement of teaching” (takes 2 pages to say). Classroom assessment is worth trying but the instructor needs to be flexible and willing to learn from the feedback it provides (that’s 2 more pages). Example technique: “One minute paper” (same as “one minute feedback” from Joy): end lecture 5min early and ask students what they learned, what they found most interesting, and what they still don’t understand.
  8. Using writing as an active learning tool: Various types of writing exercises are suggested that are more applicable to humanities courses as opposed to technical communication, e.g. dialectic, dialogue, unsent letter, etc.
  9. Using video: see above
  10. Motivating students: see above
  11. Gender, race, ethnicity. Various in-class exercises to promote sensitivity, but it’s not clear how you’d gracefully incorporate these into other classes as they are heavyweight.
  12. Students with special needs: This is an important topic but not sure it’s within the scope of being a great teacher, as there is often not much an individual instructor can do (as opposed to the institution’s facilities for supporting students with disabilities).
  13. Balancing roles as teacher/student/person: Remember you’re a grad student first, and TA second; don’t neglect your student duties, and remember to have a personal life.
  14. Reflective teaching: Self-reflection and responding to it can occur both while teaching and after class, and can use instruments such as student surveys, course evaluations, videos of yourself, colleagues’ comments on observing your teaching, copies of student work, etc.

The book has no publisher-suggested list price (you can tell from ISBN code); Amazon charges $24.95 new, but median price of a used copy on Amazon is $0.28.

Weimer, E., Improving your Classroom Teaching: Survival Skills for Scholars

This book’s writing is direct and has a lot of concrete advice that is well-researched, but as there is only one (useless) figure and zero tables, checklists, sidebars, etc., the advice must be mined from straight text. (The book also fails the editorial guideline of “try to include a visually interesting book element every couple of pages”.)  This book has one figure (which doesn’t add anything to the text) and zero of any of the other elements—it is straight text.

The book is well organized: Chapter 1 (which should really be Chapter 0 or a preface) lays out five components of effective instruction that must be mutually supporting, and the subsequent five chapters elaborate on each component:

  1. Enthusiasm
  2. Preparation & organization
  3. Ability to stimulate student thought & interest
  4. Clarity
  5. Knowledge & love of the content
    The preface also busts 2 myths about effective teaching: “Nobody knows what makes teaching effective” (in fact there’s a ton of research on effective practices) and “Great teachers are born, not made” (it takes work and practice to teach effectively).

Chapter 2 (Enthusiasm) reminds us using a quirky anecdote that students  detect and respond to the instructor’s enthusiasm and passion, even if they themselves cannot identify with and share it yet. The enemy of enthusiasm is nervousness, so identify and neutralize the gestures or habits that tend to accompany your nervousness: Do you have shaky hands? Hold your notes, or use your hands and arms to make gestures. Do you clench your fists? Put your hands in your pockets so you can’t. Shy or have trouble with eye contact? Find a friendly face to focus on at first. Keep your enthusiasm up by always trying new things: new textbooks, class meeting formats, new assignments.

Chapter 3 (preparation & organization) advises you to think of and describe your course not as a laundyr list of  topics, but as outcomes from the student’s point of view. Rather than “Eliciting user requirements, estimating work, team coordination, using low fidelity prototypes, deploying to the cloud, …” phrase it as “You will learn to design, develop, test, and deploy customer-facing applications, working with the customer to identify requirements with low-fidelity prototypes and continuously deploying to the cloud to get customer feedback.” When designing learning activities, the author points out that psychologist Raymond Perry’s work (1991) showed that what students believe about their ability to succeed has more impact on their success than the (student-reported) effectiveness of the instructor.

Chapter 4 (stimulating student thought and interest) gives concrete advice on posing questions designed to make students think:

Chapter 5 (explaining clearly) reminds the instructor that it’s often not enough to ask “Are there any questions?”. Instead, ask specific questions to gauge degree of understanding (ed.: e.g., use peer instruction), or ask students to explain the material to each other in pairs. A repertoire of interesting examples can be helpful in explaining concepts; you can invent them or borrow others’. I’ve separately compiled some tips and practices for learning from examples.

Chapter 6 (Knowledge & love of content) busts a few myths/pitfalls about course content:

Chapter 7 (Assessing their learning and your teaching) has some good concrete advice on creating exams: