Favorite Teaching Books

Chris Fudge, Writing and Learning Center

McWhorter, Kathleen. Successful College writing: Skills, Strategies, and Learning Styles. New York: Bedford, 2000, 46.

This book was presented as a particularly useful resource when dealing with students who have either struggled with and/or failed English 101 previously. It became clear that students who wrote poorly also read poorly. This text offers several tools that allow the students to assess what type of learner he or she is as well as a variety of different approaches that create a pathway to connect reading to writing. Some of the tools presented to the CASTLE group were:

• Visual Feedback Symbols
• Learning Style Inventories, including scoring and evaluation guides
• Active Learning Guides
• Models for Writing about Readings

The text has proved applicable to a variety of disciplines outside of English and suggests that assignments geared towards the student's approriate learning style will result in long term, positive skill sets in reading, writing and analysis. Professor Fudge reports that the material contained in the text has translated into new teaching methods with a positive and realizable impact in the classroom.

Karen Shuler, Business Administration

Senge, Peter et al. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. (Authors of The Dance of Change and Schools That Learn)

This book is being presented as a tool for making metacognition a more concrete concept for students. It is often employed in an Organizational Problem Solving Course and contains practical applications of concepts in the following areas:

• How to choose what to measure
• How to apply abstract concepts to practical problems
  
• How to convert the abstract idea into a concrete mental problem and aviod the should and ought thinking traps.

Another set of books introduced are older texts in the same discipline as the course text. The comparision between the two allows the development of a balance between the past and the ever-changing present. The students are able to compare the text and determine what is the same and what has changed. This process develops generational continuity by demonstrating the consistency of the human condition as well as analyze not only what has changed but why those changes occured.