What We're Reading

Patrick Brown, CTE Fellow

As I reflect on my Student Assessments of Instruction from the previous semester, I note that in the section where students can give advice to someone taking the course in the future, so many encourage practice. That led to me looking at ways to incorporate more opportunities for practice into my course and I came across a wonderful resource in retrievalpractice.org. This website is an online companion to the book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice Bain. The website contains several very approachable guides to implementing retrieval practice into our courses and these free guides are available as downloadable PDF files. The guide How to use Retrieval Practice to Improve Learning begins with this question: “What if you could raise students’ grades from a C to an A? The solution isn’t technology. It’s not more money. It’s not more class time. Curious?” If you are curious about how to incorporate more practice and therefore more and deeper learning, you should browse the resources available at retrievalpractice.org.

Phil Smith, CTE Assistant Director

Have you read William Perry? You may not know the name, but you have likely encountered his ideas on the cognitive development of college students. His original monograph is still worth leafing through. Set in Harvard in the 1960s, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (1970) offers a lot of slice-of-life excerpts from endearing, sometimes awkward interviews with undergraduates (who, given the setting, are all white and male) as they navigate their undergraduate years and reflect on how their views on learning and knowledge evolve over time. At the same time, you see Perry constructing his theory from the ground up based on these interviews. Since then, the theory itself has evolved and diversified and been taken up by other researchers such that it has entered the bloodstream of what we now call the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). My own take on the scheme is that students start with a dualistic, “right/wrong” mindset, which grows into a position of multiplicity where everything is relative and there is no absolute right or wrong to a position. Here, they are able to hold various perspectives in mind and commit to keeping an open mind while being aware of their own limitations and biases. You can hear how this sounds in this fun little student dialogue from Felder. Or just search your library for “William Perry and intellectual development" to see more variations and applications of the theory. 

Alison Barton, CTE Director

I’m always trying to figure out how to get on top of my to-do list, so it was with interest that I picked up Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. Rather than giving another set of strategies to do more during each day, however, this book primarily focuses on helping you change your mindset about how you view time and tasks. Spoiler alert: You’ll never complete your to-do list, and you only have about 4000 weeks to live. So make good choices!

Find all kinds of teaching books for check-out in our CTE Teaching Collection - Room 441 Sherrod Library!