This book has been difficult to review because as I read it I kept hearing my mother's voice saying, "if you can't find anything nice to say about something it is better to not say anything at all." Well, to start as positively as possible, this book is very ambitious. It proposes to meet "the challenges of higher education" by providing "a broad, informal overview of the theoretical underpinnings of teaching and learning in higher education from a variety of perspectives--educational, psychological, developmental, social, and more."
But these "theoretical underpinnings," the heart of the book, are not presented at all effectively. The authors carve out too much ground to cover in their padded 150 pages and consequently cover none of it very thoroughly or fruitfully, and the book ultimately reads as if the authors tried to write it from too many note cards. When they highlight pedagogical research their discussion is usually so truncated as to be of little value, and most often they simply refer to research, sending the readers to the sources themselves, as in "Bouton and Garth (1983,75), for example, emphasize the importance for students to speak about notions that they do not fully understand." Some sections of the text, like the twelve-page discussion of qualities needed for efficient lecturing, are simply spun out of the authors' own experiences and have no references to pedagogical research at all.
But the overwhelming problem with this book is that it consistently belabors the obvious and does so in a prose style that mirrors a flaccid thought process. For example, each chapter concludes with "exercises" that presumably enlarge on the experience of the preceding text, but these exercises are almost uniformly embarrassing. A few examples, selected almost at random, will perhaps give the flavor of the book's thought process and prose style. Following the chapter on "Preparing to Teach" is this exercise: "Consider a recent lesson which did not go as well as you would have liked. What might have changed that outcome and improved the class?" And from the final chapter on Peer Feedback and Coaching comes this suggestion: "Consider various aspects of your own teaching. What concerns or questions do you have? Where do you want improvement? What feedback would be useful for you? To what extent can it be quantified? How would you like it delivered? By whom? When? Develop a workable plan to solicit feedback and make a commitment to follow through."
At times, the prose in this book descends perilously close to obfuscation, as in "Physicist Peter Scott models the thinking required to connect mathematical formulas with concrete applications when he presents the effect on a liquid soap solution of two wire rings as they are slowly pulled apart." As the authors themselves observe, "many teachers will also complain about the difficulty of trying to comment on the content in a paper when writing skills are poor." This book might be of some value to beginning teachers since so much of its advice is basic, even simplistic, but why bother with it when an old standby like Wilbert McKeachie's Teaching Tips: A Guidebook for the Beginning Teacher is so readily available?
Terry Nienhuis
Western Carolina University