Peter Lindsay

This book takes a different tack from the usual books designed to assist instructors in planning and executing classroom lessons. Reflecting on the art and craft of teaching is just as important as planning for instruction. However, this aspect and action often takes a backseat to the intense nature of planning for and delivering lessons, as well as meeting student needs, advising, attending meetings, and all the other trappings of academia. The author encourages instructors to take a step back and engage in meaningful reflection on their own academic practice, with an eye to making it meaningful and rewarding for themselves as well as engaging and important for their students.

I received this book from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.… (meer)

Thought-provoking discussion of various teaching dilemmas, including cheating, and suggestions for how to think about solving them for your own, individualized teaching persona. Teaching as craft, Lindsay suggests, means teaching as an end in itself, teaching people to want to learn. Advice I liked: “When teaching abstract concepts, start with concrete examples; in fact, it is best to reverse the common order used to explain a concept. … every step [in the conventional order] is an effort to remedy the confusion created by the previous one: the definition seeks to capture the word, the explanation seeks to clarify the definition, and the examples seek to concretize the explanation. Instead of each step preparing students for the next one, each is reduced to doing damage control for the preceding one.” Likewise, Lindsay is no fan of rubrics: “if an assignment can be reduced to a set of boxes for my checking, it hardly seems worth my trouble to read it.” Nor is he a fan of technology in the classroom, unless it works for a particular teacher as a tool to generate excitement about learning.… (meer)