Resources
How can a teacher remain whole and happy, able to teach well for an entire semester, an entire year, and an entire career? Teach from the Heart is about finding, rediscovering, or holding on to the heart of the teaching life, which is, quite literally, the teacher's heart. It is an encouragement to take up teaching as more than a service to provide, a profession to master, or a job to perform. It is an invitation to artisanry, teaching as a craft that we master by working with our hands over long periods of time, producing results that bear the mark of their maker. Whether you're just beginning, or in it for the long haul, sit down with Teach from the Heart and deepen your heart for the teaching life. We need not bring to class the wisdom and knowledge we gained elsewhere; we can take up teaching as a spiritual practice, with the classroom as a sacred space for our own formation as persons. With nearly forty years' experience as both student and teacher, Jenell Paris's perspective is hard-won, but still lighthearted and enthusiastic. Teachers from any context will benefit: stories and examples include preschool, K-12, community education, and college teaching. (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review This book has been written and organized to prepare critically reflective teachers to take their place in society and to do that with the knowledge, personal framework and tools to be successful. The reader will begin with an exploration of the role of higher education—it’s history and development—in influencing society. He will examine how being critically reflective can serve as a fundamental principle to guide our professional journey. She will start drawing the under-painting of a self-portrait of our identities to see what anchors us to our unique qualities that set us apart as individuals and will help inform our professional decisions and life-path. Out of the heightened awareness of our identities and experience we’ll initiate crafting a framework by which we think and are guided in our teaching practice. Readers will engage in exercises to flesh out this framework by unpacking our learning experiences and articulating what was previously implicit: our personal theories of teaching and learning. Readers will experiment with ways in which we become more conscious of how our thinking and feelings inform our actions and how this increased consciousness can guide us in creating powerful and compelling learning experiences for our students. We’ll look at the changing population of diverse higher education students and how we can build community with them by using our sense of identity as a bridge. Readers will learn to revise artifacts from our academic experiences to serve as benchmarks of our professional development and the major skill areas of teaching: preparing to teach, successfully executing our teaching plans in and out of the classroom to encourage deep and lasting learning in our students, effectively assessing their learning as an authentic process and how to document all these efforts throughout our careers for our own development and in preparation for when we are evaluated by others. I look forward to our collaborative journey together. (From the Publisher)
This interview was recorded and transcribed in November 2015. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religious studies at Boston University, where he has taught since 1996. His publications include several that directly address teaching about religion, most notably Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn't, which made an argument regarding K-12 education. In this manuscript he pulls the conversation into his own undergraduate classrooms – providing a vivid glimpse of his teaching practices, including how he conducts large lecture classes and seminars, how he works with teaching assistants, and how he conducts discussions even in very large courses. He also shares his broader reflections on the nature and importance of religious literacy and its place in American education.
One page Teaching Tactic: describes a kinetic classroom exercise to help students’ reading comprehension
One page Teaching Tactic: student writing assignments in which they are forbidden to use direct quotations but required to provide a citation for every sentence that uses information from one of their sources.
One page Teaching Tactic: an in class exercise in which students to apply course material to a local issue on the  college campus.
One page Teaching Tactic: students write tweet 140 character summaries of the week’s reading.
This essay analyzes a critical incident that took place in a hybrid distance-learning Hebrew language class that was adapting interactive, immersion-style, kinesthetic pedagogy during the week-long face-to-face intensive portion of the class – including Total Physical Response techniques in which students respond to the language with whole-body actions, entering into the world created by the language and the particular biblical text. Memorization, performance, interactive games, songs, and skits also contribute to the immersion-style learning environment. A snafu on the final day of the week led to a serendipitous solution that demonstrated Parker Palmer's idea of subject centered pedagogy. A brief description and analysis of the critical incident is followed by two short responses.
This paper addresses a perennial question of the religious studies and, indeed, of most liberal arts classrooms: How do I get my students to read texts thoroughly and with understanding? After briefly reviewing the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) data, I argue that what teachers desire is not just basic literacy, but fluency, which is the capacity to read analytically (and, for me, appreciatively), deploying the strategies of reading in a high process, improvisational mode. I unpack the elements and efficacy of one close reading classroom teaching practice I use, guided annotation, as a strategy for developing fluency. I argue that close analysis of a short, intentionally chosen passage with a guiding question builds towards reading fluency. Annotating short passages, singly and then in relation to other passages, with the author's and disciplinary concerns as the foci, practices the skills that build fluency. Annotation is akin to playing scales in music, repeating a baseline task of reading; working slowly and simply at first, but then with increasing speed and complexity, moving the student towards reading whole texts well.
We analyzed 2,621 written student comments to better understand themes which most contribute to religion classes being rated high or low in terms of the spiritual benefit students received from the class. From 2,448 religion classes taught from September of 2010 through April of 2014, comments from the top 61 (2.5 percent) and bottom 51 (2.1 percent) rated classes in terms of being “spiritually inspiring” were compared for emerging themes. The most frequent themes in higher-ranked spiritually inspiring courses were (1) intellectually enlightening and (2) applied religion to life. In lower-ranked spiritually inspiring courses the themes (1) class time was ineffective and (2) poor assessments were prevalent. We explore the practical implications from these and other findings.
Wabash Center Staff Contact
Sarah Farmer, Ph.D
Associate Director
Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu