It’s hard to learn when you’re under stress, and a lot harder when your teacher is struggling with stress, too. In a world where stress is unavoidable—where political turmoil, pandemic fallout, and personal challenges touch everyone—this timely book offers much-needed guidance for cutting through the emotional static that can hold teachers back. A specialist in pedagogical strategies with extensive classroom experience, Elizabeth A. Norell explains how an educator’s presence, or authenticity, can be critical to creating transformational spaces for students. And presence, she argues, means uncovering and understanding one’s own internal struggles and buried insecurities—stresses often left unconfronted in an academic culture that values knowing over feeling. Presenting the research on how and why such inner work unlocks transformational learning, The Present Professor equips educators with the tools for crafting a more authentic presence in their teaching work.

At a time of crisis in higher education, as teachers struggle to find new ways to relate to, think about, and instruct students, this book holds a key. Implementing more inclusive pedagogies, Norell suggests, requires sorting out our own identities. In short, if we want to create spaces where students have the confidence, comfort, and psychological safety to learn and grow, we have to create spaces where we do, too. The Present Professor is dedicated to that proposition, and to helping educators build that transformational space.
 

If teachers want an inclusive, engaging classroom, they must learn their students’ names. Sound advice, certainly, but rarely does it come with practical guidance—which is precisely what this book offers. Eschewing the random tips and mnemonic tricks that invariably fall short, Michelle D. Miller offers teachers a clear explanation of what is really going on when we learn a name, and a science-based approach for using this knowledge to pedagogical advantage.

Drawing on a deep background in the psychology of language and memory, Miller gives a lively overview of the surprising science of learning proper names, along with an account of why the practice is at once so difficult and yet so critical to effective teaching. She then sets out practical techniques for learning names, with examples of activities and practices tailored to a variety of different teaching styles and classroom configurations. In her discussion of certain factors that can make learning names especially challenging, Miller pays particular attention to neurodivergence and the effects of aging on this special form of memory. A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names lays out strategies for putting these techniques into practice, suggests technological aids and other useful resources, and explains how to make name learning a core aspect of one’s teaching practice.

With its research-based strategies and concrete advice, this concise and highly readable guide provides teachers of all disciplines and levels an invaluable tool for creating a welcoming and productive learning environment.
 

Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways.

Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves.

A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions  outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.
 

In these days of an ever-expanding internet, generative AI, and term paper mills, students may find it too easy and tempting not to cheat, and teachers may think they can’t keep up. What’s needed, and what Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger offer in this timely book, is a new approach—one that works with the realities of the twenty-first century, not just to protect academic integrity but also to maximize opportunities for students to learn.

The Opposite of Cheating presents a positive, forward-looking, research-backed vision for what classroom integrity can look like in the GenAI era, both in cyberspace and on campus. Accordingly, the book outlines workable measures teachers can use to better understand why students cheat and to prevent cheating while aiming to enhance learning and integrity.

Bertram Gallant and Rettinger provide practical suggestions to help faculty revise the conversation around integrity, refocus classes and students on learning, reconsider the structure and goals of assessment, and generally reframe our response to cheating. At the core of this strategy is a call for teachers, academic staff, institutional leaders, and administrators to rethink how we “show up” for students, and to reinforce and fully support quality teaching, learning, and assessment. With its evidentiary basis and its useful tips for instructors across disciplines, levels of experience, and modes of instruction, this book offers a much-needed chance to pause, rethink our purpose, and refocus on what matters—creating classes that center human interactions that foster the personal and professional growth of our students.
 

It seems obvious: students will have more meaningful writing experiences if we offer more opportunities for their writing to be meaningful for them. But what does that mean? What makes writing meaningful for students? What, really, makes students want to write? The authors of this practical little book asked precisely that, and the answers they gathered from students across disciplines, majors, and institutions over several years inform their advice in Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education.

The critical lessons that Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner took from their survey research, as well as from their own classrooms and workshops, are these: Students want their writing to be consequential, to build on connections with their lives, their world, and their futures, and to foster an inclusive learning experience. The authors delved further into these findings by asking what role identities—whether racial, ethnic, or cultural—played in students’ approach to writing and by exploring what students found meaningful in writing during experiences such as disruption, dislocation, and loss; personal, economic, and health challenges; and political, racial, and societal conflict. The resulting guide pairs a wealth of new data with pedagogical strategies and reflective exercises to help instructors of all kinds connect more effectively with their students—and to help students connect their lives and their writing in meaningful and productive ways.

Meaningful writing makes for a richer, more successful learning experience, and this book invites students and teachers alike to take advantage of the guidance offered here to foster connections that will serve students—and the world—well beyond academia.