A person just beginning a career in college teaching, particularly if he or she has to begin a career at an institution without a teaching center or an effective mentoring program, would be well served by the Handbook for College Teaching. The authors start out with two key assumptions, both entirely reasonable. One is that the instructor's role is to facilitate student learning. The other is that the instructor needs to know something about the theory of learning in order to be successful. This is no arid theoretical tome--far from it--but it does include a certain amount of learning theory, probably more than most new instructors will have encountered along the way to a Ph.D., unless they are in Education.
Learning theory, in fact, follows a discussion of the Role and Responsibilities of the Instructor, the emphasis being on facilitating student learning. The authors discuss subject matter competency, professional competency, and personal competency, teaching and scholarship, and diversity in the classroom. Then there is a chapter on Planning and Getting Started, with a discussion of syllabi, goals and objectives, and so on. Then the chapter on Human Learning: Facilitated or Impeded, which includes a modicum of Piaget, a modicum of Mazlow, and so on.
The chapter on Delivering Instruction includes information on lecturing, demonstration, and discussion and other group participation methods, as well as some good advice on oral questioning. The attention to demonstration, unusual in a book of this sort, is welcome. There are two more chapters, one on technology and one on testing.
The discussion of test construction and the lucid explanation of validity, reliability, and objectivity is most welcome.
The Millers are extremely thorough. They provide checklists of many, many things. For example, there is a numbered list of seven ways that pausing can enhance instruction, including
One has to wonder, sometimes, what audience this book is aimed at. The references to "school settings," the unexpected advice on how to use a flannel board, and the rather modest expectations of the reader's knowledge base--signalled by passages such as this one: ". . . Hull, Gagne (gon-yea), B. F. Skinner, and more recently Piaget (p-au-zhay) . . ."--seem more suited to the elementary/secondary teacher.
Likewise the technology sections are badly out of date. There is a section on how to use an opaque projector, and one on the filmstrip--in addition to the flannel board--but nothing on, say, PowerPoint. The discussion of computers is devoted to word processing and data storage, for the most part. There is nothing to show that listservs, Web-based courses, CD-ROMs, or Internet searches for term papers are a familiar part of almost all college and university environments now.
These are serious flaws; they need not remedy the book unusable, though, so long as readers realize that (like every other book) it is incomplete. Every new instructor can find somebody--possibly a student, certainly somebody from the computer or media center--to bridge the Millers' gaps in recent technological expertise. This Handbook for College Teaching will be used for its sometimes slightly plodding but always serious and clear exploration of many aspects of the instructor's art.