13.1 Educating for Life -- Permissions -- About the Contributors -- Index

Students and faculty come together in this powerful collection to discuss experiences and teaching practices that can change students’ lives. Organized into four parts, these first-person accounts explore the many challenges facing college students, offering advice on how to best serve low-income, first-generation, underrepresented student populations; how to foster political engagement; and how to help students take charge of their lives and education. The stories in College Teaching and Learning for Change provide higher education faculty and student affairs practitioners with an increased understanding of the wide variety of student experiences, and together they constitute a platform for encouraging student success.

Higher education is in an unprecedented time of change and reform. To address these challenges, university leaders tend to focus on specific interventions and programs, but ignore the change processes and the contexts that would lead to success. Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that change agents typically possess and provides research-based principles for approaching change. Framed by decades of research, this monumental book offers fresh insights into understanding, leading, and enacting change. Recognizing that internal and external conditions shape and frame change processes, Kezar presents an overarching practical framework that can be applied to any organizational challenge and context. How Colleges Change is a crucial resource for aspiring and practicing campus leaders, higher education practitioners, scholars, faculty, and staff who want to learn how to apply change strategies in their own institutions.

The distinctive group of forty colleges profiled here is a well-kept secret in a status industry. They outdo the Ivies and research universities in producing winners. And they work their magic on the B and C students as well as on the A students. Loren Pope, director of the College Placement Bureau, provides essential information on schools that he has chosen for their proven ability to develop potential, values, initiative, and risk-taking in a wide range of students. Inside you'll find evaluations of each school's program and personality to help you decide if it's a community that's right for you; interviews with students that offer an insider's perspective on each college; professors' and deans' viewpoints on their school, their students, and their mission; and information on what happens to the graduates and what they think of their college experience. Loren Pope encourages you to be a hard-nosed consumer when visiting a college, advises how to evaluate a school in terms of your own needs and strengths, and shows how the college experience can enrich the rest of your life.

"This book for educators shows that focusing on relationships, resilience, and reflection can better prepare graduates for the future"--

Prospective college students and their parents have been relying on Loren Pope's expertise since 1995, when he published the first edition of this indispensable guide. This new edition profiles 41 colleges—all of which outdo the Ivies and research universities in producing performers, not only among A students but also among those who get Bs and Cs. Contents include: Evaluations of each school's program and "personality" Candid assessments by students, professors, and deans Information on the progress of graduates This new edition not only revisits schools listed in previous volumes to give readers a comprehensive assessment, it also addresses such issues as homeschooling, learning disabilities, and single-sex education.

“College teaching is not rocket science – it’s much, much harder.” Diana Laurillard, University of LondonCollege faculty, both adjunct and full-time, stand with their students at the coalface of learning, wishing for more to succeed and disappointed at how illusory academic success is for so many. Among the array of investments colleges are making to improve student outcomes, from predictive data analysis to enhanced advising, too little attention is paid to supporting faculty. Yet the impact of teacher and teaching on student learning is incontrovertible. Taking College Teaching Seriously: Pedagogy Matters! stands against the tide – celebrating the incredible work faculty members do each day and challenging them to expand their capacity to present their content expertise effectively. This book presents a model of embedded professional development, which capitalizes on the affordances of technology to enable groups of faculty to examine their practice in a non-evaluative context, but with a clear focus on improvement. The core of the work involves individual reflection and the design provides for an accessible way to “see” into the classrooms of discipline peers. Most importantly, the Taking College Teaching Seriously experience is not an intense one-shot, but rather a structured opportunity for a faculty member to examine and adapt practice over time and to assess the impact of changes on student learning. Faculty who have participated in the Taking College Teaching Seriously experience found it to be transformative:• English Professor, Kentucky: Participating in (the work) this year has helped me to be more reflective in every single action. I constantly analyze how each session went... (it) gave me the tools to think about every minute detail of a classroom.• Adjunct Math Professor, Mississippi: Speaking as an adjunct, I have valued the chance to share my teaching and get ideas from others. I can honestly say that this experience has been a lifeline of sorts this year. In a “magic wand” instructional setting, I’d wish for the kind of honest, respectful and professionally challenging discussions we have in Classroom Notebook* at weekly staff meetings.*Classroom Notebook is the Taking College Teaching Seriously online platform• Math Professor, NJ: I think the continual self-evaluation and reflection allowed us to work together to brainstorm improvements and positive tweaks to be more purposeful in our classrooms as opposed to just randomly reaching in the dark for ideas and techniques in HOPE of success.Taking College Teaching Seriously: Pedagogy Matters! breaks new ground in professional development. Each faculty member is at the center of the learning experience, stimulated and supported by peers working in similar contexts. They share a desire to see more students learn deeply and find that honing their skill at adapting to the learning needs of specific classes and students allows them to realize this goal. Uniquely, Taking College Teaching Seriously illuminates the link between faculty teaching expertise and improving student outcomes.The introduction to the book examines the challenges facing faculty in higher education today and reviews the literature on teaching and learning. Chapter 1 looks at the analytical foundations for all of the model’s elements, from adult learning theory to communities of practice, and Chapter 2 presents the model’s theory of change. Chapter 3 describes the model in detail and Chapters 4 and 5 concern the infrastructure of the faculty collaborative community, focusing on both its interpersonal and technological dimensions. The book concludes in Chapter 6 with an assessment of the value of this approach to professional development and a call to action for faculty member engagement in this important work, so essential to both professional passion and mandate.