Resources
As the chief academic officer, the provost plays the central role in the contemporary university or college. He or she leads the faculty and serves as their key representative to the administration while simultaneously acting as the administration’s spokesperson to the academic faculty. How has this essential leadership position evolved over the past few decades, and what are the best practices to adopt for succeeding in specific operational areas? In seventeen essays written by some of the most successful chief academic officers in the United States, The Provost’s Handbook outlines key topics related to the changing environment of higher education while explaining what constitutes effective leadership at the college and university level. How, for example, does the provost lead in a time of disruption and shifting needs? What skills should he or she nurture in new faculty? What role should data and institutional research play in decision making? How can a provost navigate the often stormy situations of shared governance? These questions—and many more challenges presented by this role—are addressed in this essential volume. Assembled by James Martin and James E. Samels, accomplished authors and scholars of leadership in higher education, The Provost’s Handbook is destined to become the go-to resource for deans, presidents, trustees, and chief academic officers everywhere. (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: This innovative resource provides teachers with a road map for designing a comprehensive writing curriculum that meets Common Core standards. The authors zero in on several “big ideas” that lead to and support effective practices in writing instruction, such as integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening; teaching writing as a process; extending the range of students’ writing; spiraling and scaffolding a writing curriculum; and collaborating. These “big ideas” are the cornerstones of best researched-based practices as well as the CCSS for writing. The first chapter offers a complete lesson designed around teaching narrative writing and illustrating tried and true practices for teaching writing as a process. The remaining chapters explore a broad range of teaching approaches that help students tackle different kinds of narrative, informational, and argumentative writing and understand complexities like audience and purpose. Each chapter focuses on at least one of the uncommonly good ideas and illustrates how to create curricula around it. Uncommonly Good Ideas includes model lessons and assignments, mentor texts, teaching strategies, student writing, and practical guidance for moving the ideas from the page into the classroom. Book Features: - Presents no-nonsense information about teaching writing in the era of CCSS, including ways in which the CCSS are misinterpreted. - Focuses on “the core of the core,” the bedrock on which effective teaching approaches rest. - Incorporates the voices and practices of many talented teachers of writing, including ELA teachers from urban, rural, and suburban schools, as well as ELL teachers. - Addresses teachers as respected, dedicated professionals whose experiences and good judgment are the linchpins of any reform. (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: It is difficult to imagine a college class today that does not include some online component—whether a simple posting of a syllabus to course management software, the use of social media for communication, or a full-blown course offering through a MOOC platform. In Teaching Online, Claire Howell Major describes for college faculty the changes that accompany use of such technologies and offers real-world strategies for surmounting digital teaching challenges. Teaching with these evolving media requires instructors to alter the ways in which they conceive of and do their work, according to Major. They must frequently update their knowledge of learning, teaching, and media, and they need to develop new forms of instruction, revise and reconceptualize classroom materials, and refresh their communication patterns. Faculty teaching online must also reconsider the student experience and determine what changes for students ultimately mean for their own work and for their institutions. Teaching Online presents instructors with a thoughtful synthesis of educational theory, research, and practice as well as a review of strategies for managing the instructional changes involved in teaching online. In addition, this book presents examples of best practices from successful online instructors as well as cutting-edge ideas from leading scholars and educational technologists. Faculty members, researchers, instructional designers, students, administrators, and policy makers who engage with online learning will find this book an invaluable resource. (From the Publisher)
Nine contributors to the Wabash Center's “Race Matters” blog (https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/category/race-matters-in-the-classroom/) provide short teaching tactics they have used to help students engage difference in meaningful ways. 
Journal Issue.
With this report, Barbara G. Wheeler ends a long and distinguished era as a lead researcher and author for the Auburn Studies series, the signature line of publications from the Center for the Study of Theological Education (CSTE). Beginning with Reaching Out (1993) which set a focused and extraordinarily generative vision for the CSTE, Wheeler went on to author or co-author fourteen of the twenty studies in this series. These studies engaged many of the issues central to theological schools and their stakeholders: studies of enrollment and student debt, student recruitment and alumni success, and the status of faculties and senior leadership—both presidents and governing boards. With these and many other publications, lectures, and consulting projects, Wheeler established Auburn as a respected source for those wanting to understand the dynamics of this very particular set of institutions of higher education which prepare faith leaders for their vocations. Governance That Works: Effective Leadership for Theological Schools exhibits Barbara Wheeler’s characteristically clear prose and keen insight readers of past Auburn Studies have come to expect. At a time when many theological schools are experiencing significant challenges, the report helpfully exegetes several schools as notable cases of effective governance. In general, the story is one of gradual change towards better governance policy and practice. Yet many boards struggle with improving board composition—including minority and gender inclusion but also people with the right skills and a capacity to be substantial donors to the school. Among a number of notable trends, the increasing power of chief executives—with generally strong support from their faculty and boards—greatly heightens the salience of interpersonal skills on the part of those executive leaders. In a related insight, the report shows how such an interpersonally wise senior executive develops stronger leadership within the faculty and board, and a more vital partnerships between the two. (Christian Scharen)
One page Teaching Tactic: dividing up students into separate "expert groups" helps them master difficult reading assignments.
This is an edited transcript of a conversation between two founding women on the delights and demands of teaching and learning within and beyond traditional institutional life, facilitated by Lisa M. Hess of the journal's Editorial Board. The conscious feminine practices of a women's writing school, Women Writing for (a) Change (Cincinnati, Ohio), created the circle-container for the sharing of words and wisdom. Narrative, pedagogical, and organizational issues arose as the circle listened and examined the realities of contributing as a woman in higher education, yesterday and today.
In this essay, I examine the following pedagogical question: how can we unlock students' mistaken notions that religious “traditions” are monoliths, and instead help them to recognize, puzzle over, and appreciate the complex multiplicity and vibrant set of doctrinal and ritual conversations that characterize religious traditions? More specifically, how can we teach students to recognize these differences with respect to a religion's notions of god? And how can we do so even when students are particularly stuck on, invested in, or trained to see homogeneity? In answer to these questions, I present an exercise that I have used in my World Religions courses. This exercise – which I call the “Council of Newton” (named for the building in which I first taught it) – is particularly effective because it helps students uncover and wrestle with this diversity at two levels: conceptually and historically.
Working with undergraduate students invites teachers into relationship and conversation with young people at a time when they are emerging as adults and forming their identities. Faith is one area of identity formation often attended to by scholars, college professors, and their institutions. But within that, little attention has been paid to those who do not identify as religious. Additionally, “the overwhelming presence of Christianity at American institutions maintains it as the spiritual norm on campus. … Those within the spiritual norm gain a level of privilege that is often unconscious” (Seifert 2007, 11). This has an effect not only on nonreligious students but on any student who identifies as anything other than Christian; and it has a unique effect on teaching and learning in the religion classroom. In this article, I will explain what Christian privilege is, why it is a unique problem in the undergraduate religion classroom, and what teachers of religion might do in response to it. In the end, I argue that educators need to better understand the effects of Christian privilege in our classrooms and become allies to the nonreligious in particular by using pedagogies that include and support all students, in their many religious affiliations and unaffiliations.