Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator

By: Patrick N. Allitt, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Patrick N. Allitt

Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Teaching is more than a job. It’s one of the greatest responsibilities in civilized society. But teaching is no easy task. It requires craft, sensitivity, creativity, and intelligence. 

Whether your classroom consists of 3 students or 300, it’s important to be as effective a teacher as possible, both for your students and for your own professional and personal growth. The Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator is designed to help you achieve new levels of success as a teacher. These 24 lectures will help you develop and enhance your teaching style; provide you with invaluable methods, tools, and advice for handling all manner of teaching scenarios; and open your eyes to how other teachers think about and approach this life-changing profession.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2010 The Great Courses (P)2010 The Teaching Company, LLC

Created for a video format

I was drawn to this course because I myself teach social studies at the high school level. Because Dr. Allitt also teaches history, I figured I could pick up a few content-related teaching strategies. I was not disappointed.
This course was developed to be versatile and useful for many teaching content areas though. I’m certain that I would have learned something even if I was a math or science teacher too.

Biggest things to be aware of:

1. The brunt of the content is directed towards teachers engaged in college seminar classes with lecture style. With the exception of maybe a few lessons, I don’t suppose much of this class would be relevant to a highly differentiated elementary classroom.

2. There are several parts of the audiobook which are almost comical because the teaching company clearly used the audio from their visual course and put it out as an audiobook. For the most part, this is not a big deal. However, there are several parts where Dr. Allitt will be interviewing people, the audio will make a break, and the narrator will switch. There are also parts where Dr. Allitt will refer to an image and direct your attention to a PowerPoint or image as well, which is obviously not there in this format.

Overall though, I really enjoyed this production. Dr. Allitt has several unique insights which are helpful and engaging. I definitely recommend this for anyone who is interested in expanding their pedagogy.

Great material, but needs updating

This course is a helpful guide for teachers, primarily, but not exclusively, at the university level. It draws from the experience of a range of top university lecturers as well as some of their students. The lecturer is careful to mention when his suggestions and ideas are his own beliefs and references and when they are backed up by research and or supported by others. Although the original format was evidently a video, little is lost through listening as an audio only.

The main weakness of the course is that the discussions about teaching technologies are well-dated now, and the content can be rather shallow in those sections. A few of the other lectures feel a little dragged out, with unnecessarily long example recordings, for example, in the section on one-on-one teaching. An updated version of the course could look to reduce some material to create space for longer discussion on new technologies. For example, there is very little if anything about on-line courses, and there is a lot of scope for expanding on advice for using presentation slides and the positive and negative roles of the internet. The section on teaching students to write was helpful, but could be helpfully expanded. For example, while there is quite a lot of advice on how to get students to write sentences that are grammatically correct, there was a lack of advice on how to get students to be more precise in their meaning through, for example, avoiding ambiguity and vagueness. Although a bit more attention to imparting writing skills would be useful, the course sadly says nothing about numeracy skills. and if a choice has to be made between more on literacy and something on numeracy, I would vote for the latter. Another topic that would be helpful to add is teaching to people whose first language is not your own.

The course is worthwhile as it is. I hope a new edition is released.

Should be titled the Art of Teaching College

I wish the description of this book noted that this is geared towards college professors and has minimal if any content that could be applied to teaching K-6. The title is very broad but the content is very narrow and focused on the college level.

an educators goldmine

I wish i read this years ago. a tremendous benefit to my teaching and how I approach education

Helpful for Teachers and Students

Easy to listen and understand. This has given me ideas to improve my teaching. Also, I think the lessons here is also helpful to students.

Extremely dubious advice

Scare students, he says; that will keep them sharp. Make them compete for dominance; that’s the way of the “real world.” Work to make sure they always remember you, their heroic teacher, which is good because…wait, why again? Dude needs to read some bell hooks, think carefully about what he’s doing to people, and consider whether he deserves their trust. Teachers: you can do better than this.

Great series- a few updates would be helpful

This was a great lecture series with helpful tips about entering the academy and assuming the role of a college professor. Dr. Allitt provides helpful insights and practical advice about managing the classroom and various approaches to pedagogy. It would be great if there could be some updates about the use of PowerPoint and email and other technologies that have taken precedence and emerged since this was produced. Otherwise I would highly recommend this course for the new college professor.

I would like recommendations

just seemed like the only thing on the topic that was good. Some of the Great Courses on General skills I think got more in to how to make people better. I enjoyed the some of my main takeaways were exuberant, constantly be learning, check out other people's classes, also take classes that are outside of your field so you know what it's like to struggle.

Good rules of thumb on how to engage with students in an empathetic way without getting mired in the personal.

No practical tools to help students with disabilities learning emotional or otherwise. 0 talk on problem students.

Very Informational

I assumed this would just be dry and factual, but it does contain many interviews with educators, interviews with students, segments of audio from live classes, and personal tales that make it livelier than expected.

Great Course For Anyone

I have been a college adjunct for many years and I absolutely loved this course. Much of what was covered, I have experienced in the classroom and I had many moments where I thought to myself - so true !
But more importantly, the course was an inspiration to continue to improve and get better and an appreciation of the idea that the best learners and teachers are self taught and self driven.

The opposite of being a good teacher (in my opinio

I'm sorry but if he was my teacher, I would not like him. His style is rather authorative, and I never liked those teachers. I don't question his knowledge or why he is doing this course, but for me, he feels like a teacher, who goes to work, because he needs to pay his bills and not because he wants the best for his students and genuinely enjoys teaching. But this is just my opinion, I'm sure he was chosen for this course for a reason. Still interesting course, loads of good info

Great insight

This book give a quite comprehensive A to Z manual on how to teach. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

What an eye opener

I teach secondary mathematics but found this incredibly useful. Many interesting and simple tips to improve you teaching and learning experience.

Brilliant

I liked that he brought in teachers from different disciplines to give a rounder view of teaching.
He explains that everyone has to do some teaching at some point in there life and that’s why I listened. I doubt I’ll become a teacher but I want to be best equipped with skills and perspective when I’m teaching stuff to my kids or when I have to explain something to somebody in any setting.
Overall it was a great book and I’ll be re-listening to it soon: repetition!