In an era of budget shortfalls and increasingly intrusive federal and state mandates, faculty and administrators have become vitally interested in understanding what works, and what doesn't work, in the classroom. The new bywords of administrators are "accountability" and "assessment," and, while many faculty members resent this intrusion into the formerly privileged classroom, others are coming to see accountability as a rational aspect of life in a world of limited resources.

Thus, a primary question many faculty are now considering is how to improve their teaching. Many have relied for years on a lecture and questions model little changed from the Athenian stoa, but there is increasing evidence that such a model often does not provide the sort of transformative learning experience for which most college professors hope. It is our wish that students leave our classrooms with information that they can use, information that betters them; but the research indicates that the information we give them using the standard lecture format often leaves them within weeks.

The question, then, is how to create learning experiences that are "significant --" learning experiences in the classroom that lead to engaged students, students who are changed for the good and who take with them knowledge and skils which they can use in their lives and work. There is a significant body of research on this subject; unfortunately, as one might expect, it has been published in a broad range of journals and research reports, inaccessible as a whole to the average college professor.

L. Dee Fink, director of the Instructional Development Program at the University of Oklahoma, has brought together much of that research in his book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Fink, who initiated the Great Plains regional consortioum for faculty developers, seems to understand that faculty want to teach well, but resent the outside pressures from accreditation committees and administrators to do it in a certain manner approved by some legislative body, and instead offers a variety of approaches, backed by substantial research. These multiple approaches, however, all have the same goal -- creating in students what Fink broadly defines as a meaningful learning experience, the ability to take what happens in the classroom and use it to benefit themselves and others.

In early chapters, Fink attempts to take the various new forms of teaching -- small group learning, assessment as learning, service learning and the like -- and synthesize them into a set of skills which all the new forms of learning seek to develop. While one might quibble with the names or constructions of some of those dimensions, Fink's understanding that some specific technique of teaching are not nearly so important as the underlying conceptual basis of the effects we want teaching to have as a whole. This framework which Fink establishes then informs the discussion throughout the textbook of specific techniques.

Our university, like most, has been awash with teaching circles, mandates from on high, assessment group after assessment group, and the like. What we have lacked is some clear understanding of what we are trying to do beyond the vague charge to "teach better." Fink provides that framework, and while his discussion of individual techniques is sometimes lacking in detail, his framework is of sufficient merit that this is one of the few books on pedagogy that is of interest to a broad market. His discussion of outcomes, I think, is of interest to almost all readers, and there will be some specific technique or method which any reader will have not encountered and will find of use.

Mark West
UNC Asheville