From the Back Cover
This best-selling handbook is an essential toolbox—a compilation of hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises. It is now newly revised and expanded to cover more on the topics relevant to today's classroom such as technology and the Internet, simulations and games, diversity, service learning, and faculty evaluation systems.
While retaining the proven, practical information from the first edition, this revision also includes entirely new sections on teaching with laptops, course portfolios, three new sections on teaching problem solving, and a new chapter on getting your students to do readings. Other new sections include learning and adult learning, the learning-centered syllabus, the cognitive profile learning styles model, and newly written chapters on classroom management/incivility, academic honesty, and grading.
About the Author
LINDA B. NILSON has been the founding Director of Clemson University’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation since 1998. She came to Clemson from Vanderbilt University, where she directed the Center for Teaching for five and half years. In addition to managing OTEI and its staff, she holds individual consultations with faculty, consult on instructional and assessment issues on grants and to committees and departments, and designs and conducts faculty development workshops at Clemson and other universities across the country.
Dr. Nilson’s workshop repertoire includes comprehensive course design by student-learning objectives, interpreting student evaluations, peer assessment of teaching for promotion and tenure, interactive lecturing, learning styles, getting students to do the readings, case study design and debriefing, problem-based learning, cooperative learning, discussion management, questioning techniques, student-peer feedback instruments, developing a graphic syllabus, techniques for grading writing, and designing tests and assignments. In 1998, Anker Publishing released the first edition of Teaching at Its best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors and has just released the second. It is the most up-to-date and comprehensive teaching methods book on the market.
In addition to Teaching at its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. Dr. Nilson has written three book-length instructional handbooks for her employing universities. She has also published articles and book chapters on the graphic syllabus, improving student-peer feedback, teaching large social science courses, mentoring graduate students. TA training, critical thinking, and designing and publishing research on teaching. As a sociologist, she conducted research in the area of occupations and work, social stratification, political sociology, and disaster behavior.
Dr. Nilson’s career also included several years in the business world as a technical and commercial writer, a training workshop facilitator, and business editor of a Southern California magazine.
A native of Chicago, Dr. Nilson was a national Science Foundation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. and M.S degrees in sociology. She completed her undergraduate work in three years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
