33 Simple Strategies for Faculty


Book Description

33 Simple Strategies for Faculty is a guidebook filled with practical solutions on how to best help first-year and first-generation students who are struggling to adjust to college life. It gives faculty quick and efficient exercises they can use both inside and outside of the classroom to bolster their students' academic success and wellbeing.




Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms


Book Description

The best-selling book of easy-to-implement classroom lessons from the world’s premier educational system—now available in paperback. Finland shocked the world when its fifteen-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests evaluating critical-thinking skills in math, science, and reading. That was in 2001; even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education—with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing—produce students who match the PISA scores of other nations with more traditional “work ethic” standards? When Timothy Walker started teaching fifth graders at a Helsinki public school, he began a search for the secrets behind the successes of Finland’s education system. Highlighting specific strategies that support joyful K–12 classrooms and can be integrated with U.S. educational standards, this book, available in paperback for the first time, gathers what he learned and shows how any teacher can implement many of Finland's best practices. A new foreword by the author addresses the urgent questions of teaching, and living, in these pandemic times.




1000+ Tips for Life Inside and Outside the Academy


Book Description

This book is written to help readers with humanities backgrounds improve their academic research, tertiary-level teaching, professional service, and career trajectory. By utilizing 1,000+ Tips, readers can choose what skill they wish to improve by consulting a single page (for example, how to measure your impact factor). Or, with more time, readers can level up an entire area of their work by consulting one section (for example, how to promote your work). As 1,000+ Tips is designed to address the needs of readers at different points in their career, readers will be delighted to return to this concise and evergreen manual as their goals shift with their circumstances. The book learns graduate students and new faculty members to understand the basics of pedagogical practice, and to comprehend how to serve effectively on the committees that ran their departments, universities, and professional organizations. The work synthesizes empirical evidence, comprehensive literature reviews, and qualitative experience. Each chapter has a page-length overview of the subject. Each content chapter is divided into sections and each section populated by single page topics. The single page topic provides a summary and takeaways in bullet point format. Readers may be graduate students, early career faculty, independent scholars, postdoctoral fellows, lecturers, or in many other positions in or surrounding the university.




Higher Education


Book Description

The world of education is experiencing a time of unprecedented change. In our modern, Covid-racked world, educational institutions and their respective delivery methodologies have been forcibly and forever transformed. Most educators realize that these transformations are likely permanent and that procedures and systems of the past will no longer be relevant for the emerging post-Covid educational environment. The future provides countless challenges and great opportunities. Those embracing the transformation will be poised to usher in a new age of educational achievement. They will certainly unleash new educational methodologies, techniques, and strategies. These institutions and educators will chart tomorrow’s pathway.




Promoting Equitable Classroom Practices in Higher Education


Book Description

The current interest in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in higher education emerges from a reality that higher education now serves an increasing diversity of college students. An increasingly diverse student body brings to campuses various backgrounds, linguistic variations, political and religious affiliations, and sexual orientations; therefore, colleges and universities have been prompted to select content, assessment measures, and instructional strategies to not only welcome and support diversity, but to also position students’ diverse backgrounds as assets in the classrooms. This edited volume seeks to put theory into practice by inviting contributions by scholars who aim to transform the higher education classroom through equitable classroom practices premised on culturally sustaining pedagogy. Contributors to the edited volume are faculty in higher education who depict change in instruction that fosters a more inclusive and equitable learning environment. Seeking to create an understanding of how we can more fully humanize our students within historically dehumanizing institutions, we invite readers to consider equitable teaching practices through a variety of lenses. Under the canopy of access, connectedness, and belonging, this volume features initiatives that will hopefully inspire change in higher education.




Sound Pedagogy


Book Description

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness like the entrenched master-student model, a neoliberal individualist and competitive mindset, and classical music’s white patriarchal roots. The editors of this volume curate essays that use a broad definition of care pedagogy, one informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and aimed at providing practical strategies for bringing transformative learning and engaged pedagogies to music classrooms. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; listening to non-human musicality; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright




Academic Library Services for First-Generation Students


Book Description

Presenting strategies for improving academic library services for first-generation students, this timely book focuses on programs and services that will increase student academic engagement and success. Demographic data and secondary school graduation rates suggest that colleges and universities will enroll growing numbers of first-generation students over the next decade. Academic Library Services for First-Generation Students focuses on ways academic libraries can uniquely contribute to the successful transition to college and year-to-year retention of first-generation students. The practical recommendations in this book include a wide range of ideas for the design and modification of library services and facilities to be more inclusive of the needs of first-generation students. All of the recommendations are specifically aimed at addressing challenges faced by first-generation students. Topics covered range from study spaces and service points to information literacy instruction and campus partnerships. The book makes the case—both explicitly and implicitly—that academic libraries can help address known risk factors (e.g., by helping students build academic cultural competencies) and thereby improve success, persistence, and retention for first-generation students. Academic library professionals in both leadership roles and public service positions will benefit from the actionable strategies presented here.




Amazing Decisions


Book Description

Dan Ariely, the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, and illustrator Matt R. Trower present a playful graphic novel guide to better decision-making, based on the author’s groundbreaking research in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology. The internationally renowned author Dan Ariely is known for his incisive investigations into the messy business of decision-making. Now, in Amazing Decisions, his unique perspective—informed by behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology—comes alive in the graphic form. The illustrator Matt R. Trower’s playful and expressive artwork captures the lessons of Ariely’s groundbreaking research as they explore the essential question: How can we make better decisions? Amazing Decisions follows the narrator, Adam, as he faces the daily barrage of choices and deliberations. He juggles two overlapping—and often contradictory—sets of norms: social norms and market norms. These norms inform our thinking in ways we often don’t notice, just as Adam is shadowed by the “market fairy” and the “social fairy,” each compelling him to act in certain ways. Good decision-making, Ariely argues, requires us to identify and evaluate the forces at play under different circumstances, leading to an optimal outcome. Amazing Decisions is a fascinating and entertaining guide to developing skills that will prove invaluable in personal and professional life.




What the Best College Teachers Do


Book Description

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. In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.




Know That You Are Worthy


Book Description

Thirty-one alumni who were the first in their family to obtain a college degree share their experiences as first-generation students in this noteworthy new text. Their stories illuminate how the struggles of first-generation students are primarily due to a combination of multiple social inequities that are ignored, reinforced, and perpetuated by exclusive college systems. Speaking directly to current and future first-generation students, the authors offer tips and advice for success, along with powerful words of encouragement. Faculty and staff will also benefit from reading this book, as the authors describe a more equitable system in which universities are enriched by the wisdom, experiences, and talents of first-generation students while promoting a generative culture for all learners.