Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty

You enter the classroom as a subject-matter expert—but not necessarily as a teaching expert. You face the daunting prospect of quickly getting up to speed on teaching’s myriad responsibilities.

To compound the challenge, formal training for adjuncts is often scarce or spotty at best.

What are you to do, then, to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for classroom success?

Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty was created to meet that very need. It provides a wealth of both research-driven and classroom-tested best practices to help adjuncts develop the knowledge and skills required to run a successful classroom.

A collection of dozens of articles drawn from the pages of The Teaching Professor newsletter, this helpful guide was compiled and edited to ensure student success by Maryellen Weimer, PhD, the newsletter’s longtime editor and an award-winning professor emerita of teaching and learning at Penn State Berks.

Featuring contributions from an exceptional assembly of experienced educators, Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty is organized into seven chapters, each focused on a core aspect of teaching:

• Mastering instruction essentials
• Designing courses
• Advancing student learning
• Creating an optimal learning climate
• Constructing meaningful assessments
• Giving students feedback
• Teaching online

Throughout the guide, you will find careful examinations of a wide range of issues critical to classroom success. These include:

• Build a syllabus
• Use active learning to keep students engaged
• “Right-size” course content
• Develop meaningful assignments
• Manage a classroom
• Develop a “teaching persona”
• Create a good climate for learning
• Develop effective exams and quizzes
• Protect academic integrity
• Make grading both meaningful and manageable

For those whose work also takes them into the online classroom, there is an entire chapter devoted to the fundamentals of teaching in that space as well.

Compact and reader-friendly, Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty is conveniently organized to serve as a ready reference whenever a new teaching challenge arises—whether it’s refreshing older course design, overcoming a student’s objection to a grade, or fine-tuning assessments. And because each of its dozens of articles include references and resource lists, it’s easy to pursue a given subject in even greater depth.

Essential Teaching Principles: A Resource Collection for Adjunct Faculty lets you enter the classroom as confident in your teaching ability as you are in your subject-matter knowledge. It’s an important step forward in your professional development.

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