Leaving the Lectern
Cooperative Learning and the Critical First Days of Students Working in Groups
JB - Anker
1. Edition August 2007
236 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
This book records the story of how one professor at a research
university used a form of active learning to change the way he
taught--from traditional lecture and examinations to
cooperative learning and student projects.
Drawn from teaching notes, conversations with students, student
evaluations, and annual reports, readers will learn the kinds of
risks, assumptions, and decisions they will face as they change
their teaching to emphasize student learning, particularly during
the critical first days of change.
Engagingly written, Leaving the Lectern offers an honest
and insightful look at the challenges and rewards of achieving
change in the classroom.
This book
* Motivates faculty and graduate students to visualize what
changing their teaching to enhance student learning will be like by
illustrating through narration how a professor much like them made
the change
* Provides reflective questions at the end of each chapter to
help readers use the information in the chapter
* Enhances the reader's preparation for the change by
citing references to pedagogical precepts, strategies, and
tools
* Summarizes the seven themes found in the book to help bring
about the change: accept risk; use feedback; reflect; adapt and be
flexible; establish a partnership; accept that you are teaching in
a different world; welcome the joy
Foreword.
Preface.
Acknowledgments.
1 Before the Change.
2 Change Involves Taking Risks.
3 Change Can Be Piecemeal.
4 Change Is Finding and Sharing Answers to Questions About
Student Learning.
5 Change Alters What You Put Into the Course.
6 Change Emphasizes What Students Take Away From the Course.
7 Change Must Be Assessed for Student Learning.
8 Change Must Be Assessed for Teaching.
9 Change Is Hard in Isolation but Facilitated by
Connections.
10 Change Means Changing Your Concepts About Education.
11 Change Means Changing Your Concepts About Yourself.
Conclusion....
Appendix: A Sketch of the National Reform of Undergraduate
Education.
Bibliography.
Index.
as they were taught..."
--Shirley M. Malcom, American Association for the
Advancement of Science
"This book is a highly engaging approach to the challenges and
rewards of implementing effective change in the classroom."
--Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Associate Provost for Faculty
Development and Director, Center for Teaching, University of
Massachusetts Amherst
"I applaud Dr. McManus for sharing his story about how he
changed his approach to teaching. I hope it will inspire many
others to follow suit."
--Mark A. Emmert, President, University of
Washington
Oceanography at the University of Washington. He received his B.S.
degree in geology from the Southern Methodist University in 1954
and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from the University of
Kansas in 1957 and 1959, respectively. His marine geological
research has dealt mainly with sediments on the floor of the
Chukchi and Bering seas and off Washington State. He was co-chief
scientist on the first cruise in the Pacific Ocean of the drilling
vessel Glomar Challenger of the National Science Foundation
(NSF)-funded Deep-Sea Drilling Project. He has been honored by the
National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration for his marine
geological research by having an underwater mountain in the North
Pacific Ocean names after him, McManus Seamount. For 23 years he
was editor of the research journal Marine Geology.
After years of undergraduate teaching in lecture and examination,
he changed his teaching method to cooperative learning and project
evaluation and by so doing pioneered the use of cooperative
learning in the teaching of undergraduate oceanography. As a
Distinguished Speaker for the National Association of Geoscience
Teachers, he, with one of his students, led workshops on
cooperative learning in geoscience departments at several colleges
and universities in the United States and Canada. He has also been
co-leader of NSF-funded workshops on innovative teaching in the
geosciences during summers and at national meetings of the American
Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America, and
at the Ocean Science Meeting of the American Society of Limnology
and Oceanography and the AGU.
Dr. McManus has also organized and participated in sessions on
innovative geoscience education for these and other scientific
societies, especially while serving as a member of the Committee on
Education and Human Resources of the AGU. He has often been an
invited speaker on geoscience education and has published in the
Journal of Geoscience Education, the Journal of College Society
Teaching, and Geotimes. He also wrote a column "In the Oceanography
Classroom," for Oceanography magazine, the journal of The
Oceanography Society. In 2000, he was co-leader of the
NSF-sponsored workshop that recommended the NSF establish Centers
for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence, which was done in
2002.
At the University of Washington, Dr. McManus has received the
Distinguished Undergraduate Teacher Award of the College of Ocean
and Fishery Sciences. For two years he served as the first faculty
associate in the Center for Instructional development and Research
and developed a New TA Orientation Program that involved teaching
workshops for new graduate students in the School of Oceanography,
the first such program in an oceanography graduate program. In
addition, the Mossfield Foundation established in the School of
Oceanography the Dean A. McManus Excellence in Teaching Award to be
given annually to an outstanding graduate teaching assistant.
