After six years of extensive research, Leila Jahangiri and Tom Mucciolo have collaborated on a comprehensive publication about teaching and presentation effectiveness.
A Guide to Better Teaching is a self-help book that provides a new teacher, an adjunct faculty, or a seasoned professor with a thorough understanding of what it takes to be an effective teacher. Several interactive assessment tools are also included to measure levels of effectiveness according to learner preferences.
Each chapter is filled with detailed explanations, relevant stories, and action-driven tables that help teachers understand and apply skills. This book aims to enhance teaching skills by offering critical perspectives, practical suggestions, and techniques for improvement.
The skills are divided into three core categories of Personality, Process and Performance. Interactive, electronic self-assessment guides help develop an appreciation for one’s strengths and challenges. By identifying key skills, the book can be read in its entirety or in random fashion for specific development purposes, as a reference, or review.
While the book targets educators, the suggestions and the assessment tools are applicable to the entire spectrum of organizational leaders and managers, in government or industry, whose work requires giving presentations or communicating in a public forum.
Some of the more distinguishing features of the book include:
EVIDENCE-BASED DATA: The connection between audience preferences and skill development is linked to principles derived from over 30 years of the combined authors’ experience, along with support from a published, in-depth research study and a continuing review of over 1,800 learners from a variety of fields.
WEB-BASED SUPPORT: Directly linked to publisher website for instant download of assessment tools in order to get interactive analysis and reports.
MULTIPLE ASSESSMENTS: Not only can be used for self-evaluation and self-improvement, but colleagues and administrators can use the assessments as observation tools (similar to peer evaluations) to identify strengths and challenges in others and even make comparisons to a “gold standard”. Assessments can augment or replace existing audience evaluations (such as student evaluations) using the SPICE MODEL format to arrive at a more comprehensive view of effectiveness from a group perspective.
ENTRY-LEVEL STRATEGY: As a basis for faculty development, the information serves the needs of the novice who has never taught or presented, by offering a starting point for learning how learners perceive skills related to personality, process and performance.
ACTION-ORIENTED ADVICE: For each of 21 skill categories, challenges, opportunities, activities and exercises are included to help with continual improvement.
AUTHORS: Dr. Leila Jahangiri, a graduate of King’s College, London, and Harvard University, is an active clinician, researcher, and teacher, since 1991. Her scholarly focus and passion is for effective teaching and innovative curriculum development. For the past 10 years, as Chair of a large department at New York University College of Dentistry, she has made significant strides to develop faculty in utilizing multiple strategies to optimize teaching.
Always looking for novel opportunities, she met and began collaborating with Tom Mucciolo, and in 2005, Tom joined New York University as an adjunct faculty. They share a common goal of finding ways to help teachers teach better, leaders lead better, and in the process, allow teachers to become leaders.
Set for release on November 28, 2011, A Guide to Better Teaching: Skills, Advice and Evaluation for College and University Professors can be found on the publisher’s website of Rowman and Littlefield, or on Amazon.