The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching

About the Book

Professors know a lot, but they are rarely taught how to teach. The author of the Chronicle of Higher Education's popular "Pedagogy Unbound" column explains everything you need to know to be a successful college instructor.

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.

About the Author :
David Gooblar is Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. His Chronicle of Higher Education column “Pedagogy Unbound” offers college teachers practical advice, informed by research, on how to create more effective student-centered classrooms. He has written widely on American literature, including most recently the book The Major Phases of Philip Roth.

Review :
Part education theory, part reflection on labor, part toolkit. Gooblar critically diagnoses how teaching gets done (or doesn’t) in modern colleges and universities, but he 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. Whether you are a new teacher just starting out, or an experienced teacher looking to up your game, The Missing Course would be well worth your while. There really is a missing grad school course—something all too often missing, actually, from higher education, period, something central and essential: the effective and lasting transmission of knowledge and method and even wisdom, as well as the spirit of inquiry behind it all. Just about every discipline still assumes this stuff gets passed down, magically conveyed. Alas, as all too many studies have shown, it doesn’t. And one of the main reasons it doesn’t is that we don’t teach graduate students how to teach. The Missing Course does. What a delight to read David Gooblar’s new book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. Gooblar adds his voice to a growing chorus questioning the absence of systematic pedagogical training of the professoriate in higher education. With deep empathy for emerging educators and an unwavering focus on students, Gooblar offers a guide towards cultivating a collaborative, active, and inclusive classroom. If David Gooblar’s The Missing Course existed back when I was first in a college classroom, it would’ve saved me many hours of angst, and resulted in significantly improved experiences for my students. Even being more than twenty-five years removed from those days, I found the book an invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We’ve needed this book for a long time, and I’m glad it has finally arrived. The academy is filled with educators trained in their niche expertise but not in the art and craft of teaching. Thankfully, Gooblar steps into the void with a ‘missing course’ in college teaching. This book is both warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We’re so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide, as he generously shares both a careful, thorough evaluation of the pedagogical literature and a host of practical teaching tips amassed over a career. This lively, accessible, and comprehensive book is the course I wish I’d had the opportunity to take in grad school. Gooblar offers a wealth of evidence-based practices and classroom wisdom to help us teach authentically and inclusively. The Missing Course will be a go-to resource for both new and experienced college teachers.