If you are a university teacher, you need to read this book! The author’s goal is to help you to build quality into your teaching. Quality teaching inspires students, meets learning objectives, and yields excellent teaching evaluations. Quality teaching also exploits teaching efficiencies to create more time for research. To meet all these goals, the author interviewed a select sample of outstanding university teachers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Israel, and New Zealand. Their advice has been interwoven with reflections upon the author’s 30-year award-winning university teaching career in the U.S. and New Zealand. The book also includes a discussion of practical attitudes towards teaching and teaching motivation, plus dozens of stories (and even some horror stories) that serve as parables. The majority of the teaching advice is based on face-to-face instruction in the classroom, but much of it also carries over to remote/online teaching. Most of the advice is purely mechanical, in the sense that you don’t need any special skills or abilities to implement it. University teachers can use this book to improve their job performance and job satisfaction, and to increase the likelihood of promotion and career success. University administrators can give this book to new teachers to help build quality teaching from Day 1.
This handy pocket-sized edition (4.37in x 7in; 111mm x 178mm) is surprisingly comprehensive. It is 400-pages long, with 11 chapters, 95 references to literature, and a 10-page 900-item index. Although the book was written/organized with the intention that it be read sequentially, some busy readers keep it on their desk and open it randomly, sampling short pieces of advice and self-contained vignettes, as time allows. Use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to view the Table of Contents.
