Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students

Using this book to work better with my students and improve my classes. And this email list is very informative and useful tools!

As an adjunct lecturer at a California university, I have read several books on best practices for teaching college students. I recently read Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students by Norman Eng Ed.D. Can I just say WOW?As colleges and universities slash budgets, they rely more on adjunct lecturers to teach courses. Like myself, many part-time adjuncts come from the field and can teach valuable best practices in many courses. But just because we know our field doesn’t mean we know how to effectively teach it. By reading this book, I guarantee you will come away with teaching techniques and classroom management skills that you can use today. Your own teaching will be refreshed and exciting again!Major take-aways from this book:-Use power point slides sparingly and rely on images and video rather than too many bullets and sub-bullets.-Rewrite the course syllabus (where you can) by adding the benefits of the course. This chapter is GOLD!-Focus on the student, not the content. Get to know the students. Ask them what they hope to get out of the course.-In big lecture halls, get students to “turn and talk,” or get into small groups to discuss a concept, then report out.-Keep lectures short and intersperse with discussion, group-work and hands-on activities.-Use your own passion and experience for the subject to share with students.The text and appendices of the book are chock-full of resources and suggested readings and materials you can use right now. I know that I will spend my off-time refreshing my slides and my syllabus.Part 2 contains valuable classroom management ideas and thorough discussion on how to use them.In Part 3, his fresh techniques and ideas for presenting with slides will have you scratching your head, asking yourself "Why didn’t I think of that?" It also deals with deftly handling discussions and goes into classroom management.Part 4 describes what it takes to help students succeed.I have recommended this short, easy to read, guide to my university’s department chair so that the other 30+ adjuncts can learn and apply these useful and relevant tips. Visit Dr. Eng on his blog, too!

I know this saying gets thrown around a lot but believe me when I say… “This is a MUST read” for those already teaching in higher education, and for those who want to pursue a career in higher education as well! You WILL get a deeper understanding of what it means to provide a quality level of education that will improve the way you teach 21st century college students and, most importantly, get your students to be engaged and to actually learn in a more meaningful way.This book pin-points the common issues that exist in a college classroom from the perspective of not only the professor, but the students themselves who are more than just bodies with minds filling up a seat (they are human beings with life struggles). It stresses the importance of critically thinking about the audience (college students) and how to reach them in a way that will get them to be engaged and to learn actively instead of spacing out or appearing to space out with their eyes and mind on their phones!I enjoyed this book very much because it speaks to my college experiences with most of my professors. It made me think that if my professors thought and taught more along the lines of the pedagogy and philosophy of this book, then I would have gotten more out of my college experience. This book offers a unique mixture of business and the pedagogy of teaching together in a way that I feel can improve the level of quality and experience of higher education for both the students and professors. Keeping that in mind, I definitely recommend this book for any professor teaching in a university and for those on the road to becoming professors because not only is content important but so is the pedagogy or the art of teaching which is often forgotten or left behind way too much at the university level (I can barely even see it anymore!). In fact, college students can benefit from reading this book because they can get an idea of what a quality level of higher education should be and voice their opinions to try to push for change in their education (that they are paying for!).It’s seriously time to think deeper and more openly on how higher education is taught because progress is key to moving forward as a whole society, and college students play such an important role in that. This book offers important insights and tips on how to promote progress for college students who will eventually enter the real world where they will have the opportunity to make a positive impact on society, but how big of an impact depends on those educating them during their college years.

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and was a very interesting read. I'm not a teacher, but I do manage a team of young adults in their 20's. The book was recommended on the basis of just getting a team engaged. I found a lot of the book to be insightful, and started to actually utilize the tips in the book in my team meetings. It's a great read! I have less meetings with eyes glazing over now! Having a team and mentoring young adults in their career I would have NEVER thought I needed to actually get them engaged. Just need to get them to do their work! If it was only that easy! This is going to be a book I keep as a reference guide. I have a few spots highlighted, and folded to refer back to when doing my weekly team meetings.

As a college professor for over a decade, I found this book to be filled with smart, useful, actionable content. I will recommend it to my peers.