The Missing Course

“What a delight to read David Gooblar’s book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure.”—Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do

“Warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We’re so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide.”—Sarah Rose Cavanagh, author of The Spark of Learning

“Goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“An invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We’ve needed this book for a long time.”—John Warner, author of Why They Can’t Write

College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are still trained to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom.

There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. But most academics have neither the time nor the resources to catch up to the latest research or train themselves to be excellent teachers. The Missing Course offers scholars at all levels a field guide to the state of the art in teaching and learning and is packed with invaluable insights to help students learn in any discipline.

Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to course design to getting students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much students learn. Along the way, readers will find ideas and tips they can use in their classrooms right away.