Research on teaching in higher education shows that students who are well taught learn more than students who are poorly taught, and there are some teaching behaviors and strategies that are consistently associated with good teaching. This book identifies these strategies and presents them within a theoretical framework that explains how they promote students' active and meaningful learning. By presenting teaching as a logical structure of interconnected behaviors whose contribution to student learning is based on theory and research, the book promotes teachers' pedagogical knowledge and their perception of teaching as scholarly, intellectual work.
The book provides extensive practical advice that is based on the vast experience of the author as an instructional consultant and on research on accomplished teachers, taken from the domains of education, psychology, and speech communication. The practical ideas are separated from the theoretical part in a way that makes them easily identifiable.
The book also puts forth the voice of the students through authentic comments that they wrote in thousands of instructor-evaluation forms that the author collected over many years.