Tools and Tips for Teachers

Being a newcomer to the craft of teaching can be an overwhelming experience, and many new faculty members haven't received the kind of mentoring that allows them to move into the classroom with minimum anxiety and maximum effectiveness. Moreover, they may find that their new colleagues are too busy with their own teaching and research to serve as guides to the mysteries of educating students. Even experienced teachers sometimes face new challenges if they agree to teach a course that requires an approach that differs from their custom, such as a first-year seminar course based on readings and discussions. CBE—Life Sciences Education is a fount of thought-provoking and inventive ideas, but it doesn't address all the day-to-day issues that any teacher faces. Thus, for both novice and experienced teachers, it would be helpful to have a handbook that provides a quick and accessible overview of the craft of teaching. Each of these books aims to be that handbook, a one-volume entrée into the literature on teaching and learning coupled with practical advice on issues such as preparing a syllabus, choosing textbooks, or dealing with disruptive students.

These books, aimed primarily at beginning teachers but with much to recommend them to veterans, take somewhat different approaches. McKeachie's Teaching Tips is shorter and smaller (but more expensive). Tools for Teaching is longer and thus goes into more detail on many topics. For example, Teaching Tips spends fewer than three pages discussing the creation of a course syllabus; Tools for Teaching devotes a chapter of ∼15 pages to the subject, which includes a two-page checklist of items that a syllabus should address. On another topic in the introductory section on planning a course, McKeachie's Teaching Tips mentions Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and various modifications that have been proposed in the intervening decades but doesn't consider the matter in depth until a chapter on “Teaching Thinking” on p. 309. In contrast, Tools for Teaching addresses these objectives explicitly and in depth in the first chapter. The style of Tools for Teaching is somewhat more prescriptive, of the “try this, then do that” variety, giving the book more of the tone of a reference work; Teaching Tips is written in a conversational, first-person style that provides the sense of a friend offering suggestions. Each book refers to the other as part of its overview of the literature on teaching and learning. Neither is meant to be read straight through. Rather, the intention is for the owner to skim through the book and then come back to some topics in depth as the need arises, in much the way one used to use an encyclopedia. Differences aside, either would be a wonderful resource for a novice teacher, and each provides much of value to experienced faculty.

McKeachie's Teaching Tips is a kind of “Annual Reviews” for teachers, summarizing current best practices succinctly and providing entrée into the literature for further study in depth. The book is written in an engaging style, now the voice of Marilla Svinicki, who has assumed primary authorship from Wilbert McKeachie in this edition. With 24 chapters covering 340 pages, followed by 30 pages of references, each chapter introduces its topic in ∼15 pages. Some of the topics will be familiar to readers of CBE-LSE (e.g., promoting student-centered activities in laboratories and engaging large classes in active learning). Others will be helpful to a scientist pressed into service in a first-year seminar or general education course (e.g., facilitating discussion and teaching students to read actively). Thus it provides an effective roadmap for teaching within one's discipline or for venturing outside it.

The 24 chapters are organized into seven sections. “Getting Started” deals with designing a course and meeting a class for the first time. “Basic Skills for Facilitating Student Learning” addresses lecturing, leading discussions, providing written feedback, testing, grading, and assessment, which is rightly distinguished from testing and grading. “Understanding Students” introduces such issues as teaching a culturally diverse population, motivating students, and dealing with problem students. “Adding to Your Repertoire of Skills and Strategies for Facilitating Active Learning” is self-explanatory—it considers the use of techniques such as case-based, problem-based, or group-based learning; using writing effectively to promote learning; and using technology to enhance learning. “Skills for Use in Other Teaching Situations” considers labs and large classes and will thus be of considerable interest to most science teachers. “Teaching for Higher-Level Goals” reviews the literature on how to help students become self-directed, and self-monitoring, learners. Finally, “Lifelong Learning for the Teacher” considers how to use these skills to enhance one's own talents throughout one's teaching career.

Tools for Teaching is chunked into 12 sections comprising 61 chapters over 556 pages; here the references are given at the end of each chapter rather than at the end of the book, which makes it convenient to locate a reference mentioned in the text for further exploration. “Getting Under Way” addresses similar issues to those covered first in McKeachie's Teaching Tips: designing a course, constructing a syllabus, setting a proper tone in the first classes. “Responding to a Changing Student Body” tackles how to tailor one's teaching for today's diverse student body, broadly construed—adult (older than 22 or 23) students, students with diverse academic preparation, students with disabilities, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, and so forth. “Discussion Strategies” obviously focuses on ways to encourage participation in discussion-based classes. “The Large Enrollment Class” covers primarily effective lecturing and ways to personalize the learning experience for students; it is followed by “Alternatives and Supplements to Lectures and Discussion,” which is a grab bag of other means of helping students learn, whose topics range from the expected (e.g., group learning and case studies) to some I found surprising and intriguing, such as using simulations. This section also addresses undergraduate research, guest speakers, and civic engagement. The following section on “Enhancing Students’ Learning and Motivation” needs no explication, and similarly “Strengthening Students’ Writing and Problem-Solving Skills” delivers what it promises. The section on “Testing and Grading” ranges from test construction, different forms of tests, and types of questions to promoting academic honesty and easing students’ test anxieties. “Presentation Technologies” covers everything from flip charts to PowerPoint and videos as means for conveying your message to students. The section on “Evaluation to Improve Teaching” covers assessment tools. The last two sections are “Teaching Outside the Classroom,” which treats matters such as office hours, communicating with students electronically, and academic advising, and “Finishing Up,” which considers the issues of wrapping up a course, student evaluations of instructors, and letters of recommendation.

As these lists indicate, the books cover an exceptionally broad and useful range of topics in relatively little space. Consequently, they might serve as more of an appetizer than a main course, but the extensive references in each provide a way to delve more deeply into any topic that strikes one's fancy. Fortunately, both books provide a useful overview of and guide to that literature and in many cases can stand alone. For example, if you're stumped about how to introduce a new topic tomorrow, they can provide a quick source of new approaches, or they can offer some help when you find yourself confronted by an unresponsive class or sulky student. In short, they both provide useful immediate advice as well as a guide to further reading on topics that you might want to consider in depth.

While there is considerable overlap in the topics covered in the two books, there are differences as well. For example, McKeachie's Teaching Tips contains a chapter on teaching laboratories by Brian Coppola, a topic not addressed by Tools for Teaching, and the final chapter on maintaining vitality is distinctive. On the other hand, a number of practical matters such as effective use of office hours, writing recommendations, and so forth that every faculty member deals with are covered only in Tools for Teaching.

For many years, as director of faculty development at Lewis & Clark College, I have provided a copy of McKeachie's Teaching Tips to all new tenure-track and visiting faculty members and have used it extensively myself. There's a good reason that it's now in its 13th edition; it has stood the test of time. Tools for Teaching is a more recent entry into the market and of necessity has displaced itself somewhat from Teaching Tips. I was less familiar with it and worried that my long acquaintance with Teaching Tips might color my review, so I asked two new postdoctoral teaching/research fellows in my department to give their reactions to the books. Somewhat to my surprise, both preferred Tools for Teaching, although both found much worthwhile in both books. The main reasons that the postdocs offered for their preference were that the language in Tools for Teaching was more straightforward, while education jargon occasionally intruded into McKeachie's Teaching Tips (e.g., “operationalization”) in ways that confused them, and that in striving for brevity McKeachie's Teaching Tips did not provide sufficient depth or was too elementary to serve as a one-stop resource.

Having internalized education language myself, I missed the jargon issue but agree that McKeachie's Teaching Tips sometimes gives short shrift to complicated issues (while at the same time giving a succinct introduction to them and references for further reading). I also sometimes disagreed with the advice given by one book or the other; this is an inevitable consequence of having become somewhat set in my ways in three decades of teaching and of having a different perspective from the authors of these volumes. To illustrate, McKeachie's Teaching Tips has a section on dealing with aggressive, challenging students that assumes that these behaviors arise from good motivations—either because they are trying to test their own understanding by challenging yours or because they are already convinced of the correctness of their viewpoint. However, at least in science classrooms, I have seen students challenge a professor whom they think lacks the authority to teach science because she is a woman or person of color. Bias can also be a reason that students take a confrontational stance, and I think the book fails to acknowledge this possibility and to consider how to deal with it.

These drawbacks notwithstanding, I have long been a fan of McKeachie's Teaching Tips, and I am a new fan of Tools for Teaching. Both are valuable resources for college teachers and no bookshelf is complete without at least one of them. They are sufficiently different even when they cover similar topics that one could not go wrong by owning both books. If one were looking to choose only one, McKeachie's Teaching Tips would be a good choice for an experienced teacher looking to expand his or her repertoire of educational skills, while Tools for Teaching is an effective and thorough introduction to the craft of teaching for the newcomer to the classroom. Although the books are somewhat expensive, both are available from online booksellers at discounted rates and in inexpensive electronic editions for at least one brand of e-reader.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS