We Recommend

Explore Teaching Insights and Resources

Welcome to our collection of teaching-related recommendations, curated by CFC staff and WCU faculty to inspire and enhance your practice. This page showcases a diverse selection of books featured in our monthly newsletters.

Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it (First ed.). Basic Books, Hachette Book Group. 

“My students are so distracted!” – If this is a thought that has crossed your mind while teaching recently, this book is for you. James M. Lang begins his book Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it with an examination of why humans are both able to focus on specific tasks but also get easily distracted. He then turns to the modern classroom, where students face both internal distractions (mind-wandering) and external ones (technology, peers, and environment). 

Distracted does not provide a quick fix that allows you to implement an easy-to-follow-3-step procedure that will eliminate all distractions from your classroom and turn your students into attentive sponges. Instead, Lang’s book is an acknowledgement that everyone gets distracted and that getting distracted is part of human nature. While a more apt title might have been “Cultivating Attention in the College Classroom for the Distracted Mind,” his advice is very actionable. It ranges from creating community by learning and using student names, selecting and wording a technology policy for your syllabus, being strategic about how you structure your course and implementing active learning activities, to utilizing assessments in different manners.  

If this is a topic of interest to you, you will finish Lang’s book with a clear idea of how you as a college instructor can become a “steward for attention” through a range of small and larger actionable choices in both course design and classroom practice you can take.  

Eyler, J. R. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching (First ed.). West Virginia University Press. 

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

As the fall semester begins to wind down, some of us may be wondering is there anything we can do during the rather short winter break to improve both the instructional value in our courses and the learning outcomes for our students? The surprising answer is yes, quite a lot. Many teaching “strategies” tend to focus on large, sweeping reforms to both instruction and learning modalities. While those can be productive and sometimes necessary, they also require large swaths of time, feedback, and analysis. These methods would tend to fall under the umbrella term of “big” teaching, i.e., large or chambered shifts. On the other hand, the idea of “small” teaching, looks to allow instructors to make incremental or bite-sized changes to their instruction (5-10 minutes) and learning outcomes in the immediate; minute activities and strategies one can implement into any course to elevate student learning and participation.

In Small Teaching, Lang offers various models to help instructors of all levels, focus less on ‘higher order thinking’ learning and more on strategies that help students recall and critically think about as well as understand the basic concepts of their discipline. Some of these “bite sized” strategies, all of which are backed up by current research in teaching and learning, include participatory engagement with student-led reviews at the beginning of each class, summarization by students of the key points of the discussion at the end of class, or low-stakes quizzing. Lang’s book is an excellent resource and guide for anyone who is interested in shifting the focus of their classroom towards student success, motivation, and retention. The suggestions included in this book do not require a mass restructuring of one’s entire course but rather offers “small” strategies that can be implemented in the here and now. Small Teaching is available from various online retailers and independent bookstores. A 30 page preview is available. 

Bishop-Clark, C., & Dietz-Uhler, B. (2012). Engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning: A guide to the process, and how to develop a project from start to finish. Stylus. 

Many of us teaching in higher education honed our instructional skills through the School of Hard Knocks; we began our teaching careers with enthusiasm and good intentions, started out with some early successes (and plenty of failures?) to learn from, and with practice, the support of colleagues, and professional development, we’ve continued the slow journey towards mastery of our craft.  But we haven’t reached the end of our teaching travels, and many of us look for ways to foster our own intentional, consistent growth as instructors. One way to continually improve our courses and instructional techniques is through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

In Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Stylus, 2012), Cathy Bishop-Clark and Beth Dietz-Uhler offer several definitions of SoTL, including “the study by classroom teachers of the impact of their teaching on the learning of students in their classroom (p.12)”. Their accessible text wraps up at only 147 pages, and includes chapters on Generating the Research Idea, Designing the Study, Collecting the Data, Analyzing the Data, Presenting and Publishing Your Results, and more.  Information is clearly presented, and the authors even include worksheets throughout to assist you in developing your own SoTL plans.  If you’d like a sneak peek at the book, you can look at a 30+ page preview and it is readily available from online retailers.

If you’re interested in SoTL research, I’d love to hear from you. I’m currently serving as a Faculty Fellow for SoTL with the Coulter Faculty Center (CFC), and whether you’re considering starting your first SoTL project or have expertise to share in this area, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at clhallyburton@wcu.edu. If you’d like the support of other WCU colleagues in starting or advancing your SoTL journey, I also encourage you to join our SoTL Faculty Learning Community. In the meantime, keep learning and teaching!

Denial, C. J. (2024). A Pedagogy of Kindness. The University of Oklahoma Press. 

In many institutions, academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways.

A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.