Customer Reviews

The Professor's Guide to Teaching: Psychological Principles and Practices

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This book is well-structured and contains a lot of helpful tools for new instructors at the college level.

Great book for advice on teaching at the college level. The book is well written and based on literature review, not mearly opinion. Highly suggested.

Forsyth's Guide to Teaching emulates a good class: the content is well researched, thought provoking, clearly presented (good use of bullet points, charts, and tables), and well-suited for current and prospective professors. The tone of the book moves between the familiar and the authoritative. For example, while the principles and practices are grounded in current research on teaching and learning, Forsyth uses his practice wisdom to comment on findings from the literature.

This book does not try to be the last word in teaching (e.g. the material on discussions, while sufficient, is better covered in Brookfield and Preskill's Discussion as a Way of Teaching). It is a good first word, and for people teaching those in the helping professions (clinical social workers, psychologists, nurses, etc.) it can answer many common teaching questions. The section on "Using technology creatively in teaching" begins with a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and references to the French impressionists. While the information might be somewhat redundant for the under 30 crowd, Forsyth covers all the technology bases in a user friendly way.

I checked this book out of the library, but found myself wanting to write notes in it, highlight and personalize it, so I ended up buying it. I'm glad I added it to my library.