A few teaching resources

Every year someone suggests adding teaching resource to the Academe section.  That’s a great idea, except I don’t really keep track of what’s good online.

Every summer, I read a book on pedagogy.  The one that I go back to the most for ideas and thinking through teaching is Ken Bain’s What The Best College Teachers Do. It’s based on research and has ideas that are applicable at every level of college and university teaching.

When I started teaching large lecture courses there was next to nothing online.  A quick search of “teaching the large lecture course” yields a wide range of sources, though I can’t really speak to them in terms of quality.  I would still love to see a listserv of people dedicated to discussing this very special type of teaching, as it’s a lot of the undergraduate teaching I do.  (Over 3000 students served!)

The Pedagogy Project at HASTAC is a great melange of resources, with an emphasis on digital humanities and new approaches to pedagogy.

Teaching Carnival was among my favorite academic blogs, though it’s not exactly a standard blog.  It was more first person experience than it is systematic advice for teaching. Hasn’t been updated since 2012, but the advice is still good.

In 2013 I did a guest-post on ProfHacker that discusses multiple choice questions.  One of the commenters linked to this very helpful paper by Mary Piontek: “Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams” 

Alisa Perren’s “Useful Contextual Videos for Media Classes” is exactly what the title says.

Shannon Moreira and Kathy Luckett’s “Questions AcademicsCan Ask to Decolonize Their Classrooms” is what it says, and although the context is South Africa, one could easily repurpose them for any settler-colonial context.

Student evaluations of teaching are mostly a terrible way to judge teaching effectiveness, though you can sometimes learn things if the same comment is repeated enough.  Here’s another part of the problem: they are biased towards white men.  Here’s one quick read from LSE on the subject from a gender perspective, but there is a growing literature out there worth pursuing if this is an issue for you.

Finally, some posts on teaching-related matters from my blog, Super Bon!:

Some thoughts on online student evaluations

A Low-Tech and Efficient Method for Course Planning

Simple Steps for Equitable Course Readings