Please find below the top 10 books on teaching as reported in Chronicles of Higher Education.
· 1. What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain (Harvard University Press, 2004). You may have seen me mention this book previously in this column, or perhaps you have attended Ken’s popular summer institute, built around his research into the attitudes, habits, and practices of highly successfully college faculty members. This book remains the gold standard in the field for me, mixing field observations of outstanding teachers with solidly grounded research into learning and motivation theory.
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· 2. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel (Harvard, 2014). Two cognitive psychologists and a novelist provide an excellent summary of the research on how people learn, and some of the implications of that research for those of us who teach. You can read more about the book in my April column. It provides a good complement to Bain’s book to help you better understand the work of both teachers and learners.
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· 3. How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching,by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman (Jossey-Bass, 2010). This book is more specifically tailored than Make It Stick to faculty members in higher education. Ambrose and the other authors provide readable overviews of key components of the teaching-learning transaction (motivation, mastery, feedback, and more), point to fascinating experiments and research findings, and offer practical suggestions for how faculty members can accommodate the findings in their courses and classroom practices.
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· 4. Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, by Daniel T. Willingham (Jossey-Bass, 2009). Although this book is meant for K-12 teachers, Willingham’s deep familiarity with cognitive theory makes it an enlightening one for higher-education faculty members as well. Filled with graphs, illustrations, anecdotes, and examples, the book introduces and clearly explains a variety of terms associated with student learning.
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· 5. The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning, by James E. Zull (Stylus, 2002). This one rounds out the sublist of books that focus on learning theory and its implications for teachers. Like Willingham, Zull gives clear overviews of what neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us about how the brain works, complete with illustrations and a rich set of examples and anecdotes. You will find Zull, a biologist, digging more deeply into the physical brain than Willingham does, but you will walk away from this one equally enlightened about the learning challenges and opportunities that our students face every day.
· 6. Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, by José Antonio Bowen (Jossey-Bass, 2012). This book provided a temporary cure for my revolution fatigue. Bowen argues smartly that higher education’s "most precious (and expensive) asset is student-faculty interaction," and that we can use technology outside of the classroom in ways that enable us to enhance and improve that interaction. He calls for a certain amount of revolution, but he also offers a wide range of practical resources and suggestions on how to improve one’s teaching practices in light of the technologies available to us. Even if you aren’t looking for revolution, you can find myriad ways here to improve your courses. (You can read afuller review of Bowen’s book on my blog.)
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· 7. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol S. Dweck (Ballantine, 2006). I came late to the party on this book. Dweck has conducted research for many years on how students’ attitudes toward learning and intelligence shape their educational experience. Students with a "fixed" mind-set believe they are limited by the intelligence they were given at birth; those with a "growth" mind-set believe they can get smarter. Not surprisingly, students who believe in growth are more successful. Read this book to find out how you can help students (and yourself) move from fixed to growth mind-sets.
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· 8. How College Works, by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs (Harvard, 2014). I have many fond memories of seminars or informal gatherings in the homes of my undergraduate professors. According to Chambliss and Takacs, such personal interactions with faculty members are key indicators of student satisfaction with the college experience. If you are looking for ammunition to lob at administrators who want to redesign your campus from the ground up, or to conscript you into the next strategic-planning process, hand them a copy of this book and walk away. Small changes, it argues, make more of a difference than expensive new programs.
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· 9. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Harper Perennial, 1990). Not directly related to either teaching or learning, this book presents fascinating research on the state of "flow," in which people are thoroughly engaged in an absorbing activity that brings them deep feelings of satisfaction—and, ultimately, happiness. Our best learning experiences are characterized by the state of flow, and hence we have the opportunity to enrich the lives of our students by creating such happiness-inducing experiences for them. Reading this book will give you a new perspective on the buzz of positive energy you witness when students are deeply engaged in some task you have given them. It might just help you design such tasks more effectively.
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· 10. Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It, by Donald L. McCabe, Kenneth D. Butterfield, and Linda K. Treviño (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). We don’t like to talk about it, but we have to. This book presents decades’ worth of research, and the numbers aren’t pretty. Think your students don’t cheat? The odds are not in your favor. McCabe and colleagues tell us how much students are cheating these days (more than you think), and how we can most effectively handle the problem.
Educate, Empower, Elevate
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder, Convener & President
MTC Global & Knowledge Cafe
Participant: United Nations Global Compact
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www.mtcglobal.org /www.knowledgecafe.org
Cell: +91 96323 18178 / +91 81520 60465 / +91 7411716392
Email: president@knowledgecafe.org
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