Thinking Teaching: Stories, Insights, and Strategies to Ignite Reflection, Discussion, and Imagination - Paperback

by Nancy Lynne Westfield (Author)

Teaching adult learners in college, graduate school, and seminary can be challenging--even for the most experienced professor. This resource provides creative essays to improve your teaching prowess and invigorate your teaching life. The storied essays invite constructive and imaginative reflection for your habits, practices, and aspirations of teaching. Written from a first-person perspective, the chapters focus on such topics as classroom dynamics, student learning activities, course design techniques, mapping the teaching career, facilitating student discussion, and learning more effective ways to coteach. The chapters are poignant, forthright, and illustrative of the complicated dynamics of the teaching profession. The stories in this book expand what is typically talked about in teaching and provide avenues to consider the humanity and vulnerability of the teacher and the learner. Each chapter concludes with material for reflection, enabling readers to consider the specifics of their own teaching context. The chapters spark conversation and encourage meaningful discussion. This book aids reflection by individual teachers as well as by small groups of teachers, or it can be used as a resource for entire faculties. Colleagues in every season of the teaching career will find assistance. This book supports your efforts to advance your teaching and develop your teaching life.

Author Biography

Nancy Lynne Westfield is Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. She hosts a podcast titled Dialogue on Teaching about teaching and the teaching life, available on all major podcast platforms. Her blog, Teaching on the Pulse, can be found at https: //wabashcenter.edu/. She is the author of Glimpses of Me and Mine (Resource Publications, 2023) and Dear Sisters (2001).