Teacher Training Books

"Life on the Tenure Track" is a refreshingly funny look at the life of a new teacher. Being a new teacher myself, I could easily relate to Lang's story and I think I have been in a lot of the same situations he has faced. While reading this book, I looked back at my own classroom experiences, laughed, and realized, as Lang does in the book, that life goes on. "Life on the Tenure Track" may be about a first year college professor, but any classroom teacher could probably relate to his experiences and lessons learned. Lang helped me realize that as a new teacher and professional student, I do not always have the luxury of finding time to write. The lesson I take from Lang is to create lists of writing ideas and to write about the process of not writing, to write about your experiences.

The author provides warm, reflective, from-the-frontlines commentary on being an English professor at a small college who is also a Catholic, a father, a person with chronic health problems, and an unambitious researcher. If not many of those identifiers apply to you, don't bother with this book; it is written from a highly personalized perspective. For more widely applicable help, I recommend Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty Members or Emily Toth's Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia.






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James Lang has a gift for writing, and writing honestly. His story is one that anyone within or interested in the academic world can relate to. The telling of his experience draws the reader into both his world while inviting the reader to consider his or her own experience, motivation and challenges.

While this book may be of little interest to those outside the walls of academe, I might be bold enough to suggest that Lang's writing style is such that almost anyone could enjoy reading this book. I recommend this book to a variety of people. First and foremost, this is a must-read for grad students aspiring to tenure-track positions. It is on the list of required reading for junior faculty as well, if only because it provides a beacon of solidarity amid an ocean of rocky trials. Finally, this is - as I alluded earlier - just a superb book that anyone could enjoy. So go ahead and get this today!

Lang does an excellent job describing the job of an assistant professor, as well as documenting an interesting personal journey.

I appreciated the very human story, but as someone just starting out on this path, I found it discouraging that the moral of the story seems to be "don't even try to get research done during the term" rather than "try and work with what you have".

From Lang's description, it sounds like he has all the qualities of "slow starters" illustrated in Robert Boice's book _Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus_: he is impatient, overly ambitious in his goals, under-estimates how much time things take, will not work unless he has large blocks of time, allows other things to cut into his research time, and does not try to improve his work habits in realistic ways by taking advantage of the time that he does have. The one time he takes out a project, he tries to tackle it all at once, becomes discouraged by its immensity, and then puts it away. I kept cheering for him to discover better work habits, but he never did.

I did like his lessons about teaching and adapting to one's course, and found it refreshing to hear an honest discussion of the dynamics of departmental politics, and reassuring to hear how he felt initial hesitation to ask for advice, but always got good advice when he asked.

Author Gordon sees traditional discipline as one that is based on power: the ability to reward or punish. Power is resented, and often seen as something to challenge. He wants to see the teacher-student relationship developed to the point that the students obey naturally.

Gordon sees children's misbehavior as a conflict of needs. For instance, the teacher needs order and the child needs attention. This can be resolved, for example, by giving the child jobs in the classroom that will provide him/her attention.

What the teacher communicates is also very important. Consider some forms:

There are the Preventative I-messages, for example "I'd appreciate it if you would put your names on your papers right away, so that you won't later forget, and I won't need to lose time trying to figure out who the paper belongs to."

Minor misbehavior can be handled by Confrontive I-messages, such as: "It annoys me when you continue talking while I am talking, because it makes it difficult for me to teach."

There are the Positive I-messages, such as "I thank you for cleaning up so quickly after our experiment. You made it easier for me to prepare for the next class."

Simple in theory, but a significant paradigm shift for many educators. Excellent suggestions and common sense applications.

The typical program for "classroom management" focuses either on discipline (how to be assertive and fair) or procedures (how to plan ahead to avoid problems). These are both useful tools, but there is a subtext these discussions: the ideal classroom is free of conflict, and if there is conflict, it is either the fault of the teacher or the student. But, as any real teacher will tell you, a classroom free of conflict is a fantasy.

Students and teachers can't help but bring their clashing values, hopes, fears, struggles at home and with their friends and innumerable other issues into the classroom. And these issues are bound to cause conflict. Teachers are typically presented with two options: be strict, or be permissive; either the teacher uses his/her power to quell the students regardless of their needs, or students use their power to get what they want, regardless of how the teacher and the class suffer, and the teacher lets it slide hoping to get back to teaching. There has to be a better way!

In T.E.T., Thomas Gordon applies the highly successful and popular method developed for families in P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training) to the classroom. Very schematically, T.E.T. involves 3 steps. First, identify who is really having the problem. If a students are talking too loudly for the teacher to be heard, the teacher is having a problem and needs to communicate that to the students as a first step. If a student is daydreaming instead of working, the student is having a problem and the teacher needs to be able to listen dispassionately to find out what is wrong. Second, use "I Messages" and "Active Listening" to get to the heart of the problem (both these techniques are described in detail). Third, if a solution doesn't present itself immediately, T.E.T. describes a conflict resolution method that can help both teacher and student get their needs met without using power plays. Gordon suggests (I think rightly) that it is the use of power to solve problems that engenders the defensiveness and resentment so common to student-teacher relationships.

T.E.T. won't solve everything. Good procedures are still needed to reduce the number of situations that lead to conflict. And power based discipline is still needed in extreme cases (e.g. weapons in the classroom). But, by using the methods described in T.E.T., teachers can establish more honest and respectful relationships with their students and reduce the time wasted on power plays and petty games, leaving more time for real teaching.

Three final notes. Teachers may run into kids who have had such bad relationships with the adults in their lives that they can't help seeing teachers as enemies, to pushed and attacked whenever possible. T.E.T. may not work right away with these kids, making classic discipline neccesary.
People who don't like T.E.T. on the first read usually see it as simply another version of anything-goes permissiveness. But Gordon tries to make clear that anything that is a problem for the teacher 'is' out of bounds and 'needs to be fixed'. Its just a question of fixing the problem through dialogue instead of force.
Finally, I was basically raised on P.E.T. by my parents and I have never met anyone who has a more open, honest, and mutually respectful realtionship with their parents than I have with mine. It really can work!!

This book teaches in depth the learning foundations of drawing based art for higher level arts students. The book requires lots of reading and study: it also has many black and white examples of principals being taught. The language could be somewhat confusing for non artists.

I chose this book, along with many others, based upon the very informative reviews. The results were good and the student did well on graduate exams. Thanks all...

Having taught classes as a graduate student and now, as a part time lecturer at a state university, I have found this text to be excellent as essential support, a course framework, and a terrific reminder of everything I need to remember in my own artwork, as well as necessary knowledge for my students. Teaching any art course necessitates thorough art knowledge as well as solid pedagogical skills, which most art graduate students and new faculty simply do not have. "The Art of teaching art" provides a strong resource for this unfortunate but common situation. I highly recommend it!

I bought this book while pursuing my MFA. I was in my first semester with a Teaching Assistantship and was freaking out! I was in the predicament of being able to make great art, but not articulate and teach it. This book guided me through my TA in grad school and now is the first text I consult when teaching my own classes. I taught K-6 Art Ed for a few years and was able to apply Ms. Rockman's instruction of composition, line variation, and scaling. Once I made the move to a University setting, her chapter discussing the classroom environment and how to facilitate critiques proved invaluable. Fine Art can be such a difficult area to apply grading scales. She offers criteria for making sound grading judgements on student work. Overall, I think every Grad student doing a TA and every art instructor should have this book. It's a solid foundation for beginning or improving your teaching skills.

I bought this book hoping for clues to help my high school students. It didn't happen. This book would be a good choice for college instructors.