Teaching College

The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students

By: Norman Eng

Narrated by: Joseph Brookhouse

Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

Your students aren't reading. They aren't engaged in class. Getting them to talk is like pulling teeth.

Whatever the situation, your reality is not meeting your expectations. Change is needed. But who's got the time?

Or maybe you're just starting out, and you want to get it right the first time.

If so, Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students is the blueprint. Written for the early career college professor, this easy-to-implement college instruction guide teaches you to:

• Think like advertisers to understand your target audience - your students
• Adopt the active learning approach of the best K-12 teachers
• Write a syllabus that gets noticed and read
• Develop lessons that stimulate deep engagement
• Create slide presentations that students can digest
• Take charge of your college classroom management
• Get students to do the readings, participate more, and care about your course

Secrets like "focusing on students, not content" and building a "customer" profile of the class will change the way you teach. The author, Dr. Norman Eng, argues that much of these approaches and techniques have been effectively used in marketing and K-12 education, two industries that could greatly improve how college instructors teach.

Find out how to hack the world of higher education instruction and have your course become the standard by which all other courses will be measured against. Whether you are an adjunct, a lecturer, an assistant professor, or even a graduate assistant, effective teaching is within your grasp.

©2017 Norman Eng (P)2017 Norman Eng

Treating adults as teens and children

Anyone who has gone to university has likely sat through some really bad lectures. Dense slides. Too much content. Hour or more of the lecturer talking, with no interaction. Poor structure. Teaching at a level beyond the audience.

Norman Eng has put his many years of experience teaching into this books, giving great guidance as to how to improve lectures and teaching in general, and to avoid giving the bad lectures. Eng shows studies that prove that much of what if taught in long lectures is lost – with attention spans disappearing after 20 minutes at most. He then presents ways to avoid this.

While simplify the content of the book down really doesn’t do it justice, the book can be boiled down to (it you really had to) two main concepts: “know your audience” and “teach like you would for K-12 students”. For kids and teens teaching is interactive, engaging, varied and usually done in short bursts broken up by activities. And yet once you are out of university we are suddenly expecting students (who might only be 1 year different to a high school kid) to sit through and hour plus of talking and pick up everything that is said. The “knowing your audience” is about pitching it to their level, explaining it in ways that are relevant and making sure that the students are engaged rather than seeing it as abstract concepts.

While I am not a university lecturer, I have done some lecturing previously and regularly do presentations at work. And the content of this book is useful there, beyond the scope of just “teaching college”.

The book also has an “about the author” right up front, explaining his history and experience. I really appreciated this as it told me where Engwas coming from and why what he taught in the book would be trustworthy.

The narration by Joseph Brookhouse is good. Clear, crisp, well-paced. He does a good work covering the topics and conveying the information within. No glaring issues at all with the narration or audio production.

The book also gives you access to a lot of additional supporting materials as Eng's website: normaneng.org/audiobook-resources

Very practical and helpful

I've been a college professor at the university level for 16 years, and am always looking for resources to improve my teaching, better reach my students, and help them retain material in creative, practical ways. This book was very helpful for all those reasons, and more. I plan to go through the audio book multiple times and make a list of the many suggested teaching techniques Eng covers.

Good advice for post-secondary educators

Any additional comments?

This book was a great reminder of perspectives, tips, and strategies for teaching at the post-secondary level. Most of the ideas in the book are consistent with what I learned as a B.Ed. student (class of 2007), and with the professional development resources/training at the post-secondary institution where I currently teach full-time. Although I'm generally familiar with the material, I definitely believe that it was worthwhile to review the ideas in the book and reflect on ways that I could improve my teaching. The audio narration was well done and I truly appreciate it when audiobook authors provide links to resources! (I'd be in heaven if I could get digital access to illustrations from print copies of my audiobooks, via password protected web pages...)

Based on my own experiences as a post-secondary educator, I would suggest that you shouldn't feel like you need to follow all of the tips in this book (there are so many good ideas, it would be overwhelming to try to adopt all of them at once). However, if you follow at least some of them you will become a better educator. Even minor changes can result in major improvements (from a student engagement perspective). If you're as engaged with the students as you want them to be engaged with you, then you'll be able to detect what works and what doesn't work when you teach. Don't expect perfection right away, adopt a continuous improvement approach to your lessons, and enjoy the high that you feel at the end of a really effective class (it helps offset those days when students don't seem to find any of your jokes funny!).

Anyway, this book was an enjoyable read. Even if the material is familiar to some readers, it's never a bad idea to think about one's philosophy of teaching and consider how that philosophy translates into practice.

I provided my opinion in exchange for a complimentary copy of the audiobook from the author, narrator, or publisher.

Outstanding. Filled with practical tips

This book should be required reading for all new college teachers. Norman Eng answered many of the questions I have wrestled with for years. I felt that the only way I could improve my teaching was to get a degree in education. Although I'm sure that would improve my craft, listening to this book and impementing the suggestions is much easier and less time consuming. Thank you for writing this book!

Excellent for ALL teachers!

For a relatively short audiobook, this book is EXTREMELY useful. There is a strong encouragement towards fragmented and variable class time usages so as to keep attention and use of the Socratic method style. There are many examples of HOW to implement the techniques, evaluate and receive feedback. If you teach, at all, LISTEN TO THIS. It is worth every minute. The 'what', 'why', 'how' and even 'when' are all included!

I have repeatedly observed, in grad school, graduate students thrown into TAing courses alone without much advisement (myself included) and new professors flounder while trying to experiment with teaching for the first time. In college, many teachers are Not given any advise as to how to teach. This will alleviate the common problems of the classroom quickly and provide understanding on all fronts!

Not just for new professors!

When our college dean recommended this book - and purchased it for new faculty - I got curious. I immediately downloaded it and binge-listened (while driving, cooking, etc.). Only three days out from our semester, I immediately redesigned my syllabus. While I was already doing *some* of the methods he recommended, he really opened my eyes to how I can better engage my own students. I teach and upper-level, required programming course and my weaker students get discouraged quickly because they can immediately tell they are not prepared. I am going implement some of the strategies starting Day 1. I would love to see more for those of us who do not have assignments that evaluate presentations and prose, but teach mathematics and programming. Also, I do appreciate the wordsmithing in a positive light, but there are academic integrity violations that have consequences and that must be clear to the student. I am still ironing that bit out. In closing, I was thinking that this book is not just beneficial to new professors, but essential to those teaching for decades the way we were taught.

Enjoyed it very much.

Gleaned some good ideas on improving my syllabi. Thank you for including access to the audible resources.

It will take me DAYS

Absolutely critical importance & wonderfully creative ways to take charge & have fun in the classroom! it will take me DAYS, maybe even months to implement all the wonderful thoughts this book has shared! links to cisit as a follow up...ya, a definate read for anyone teaching!!

useless if you want to teach online

as the author himself admits this book is useless for teaching online courses. also, after being around k-12, the advice to teach college the same way as k-12 is hard to follow.

a little dated but good.

Thuis really helped me refine lectures and consider how to improve my active learning in class for my grad courses. A good survey and step by step guide.