Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator

By: Patrick N. Allitt, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Patrick N. Allitt

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

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.

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.

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 Good

This was very insightful. I can’t say there was anything I did not like. Very well taught and provides anybody who teaches with plenty of things to think about and potentially work on improve on.

an educators goldmine

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

Great for an overview of approachable lessons regarding teaching.

As a GTA in my first semester of a graduate program that was thrust into the profession without training, I found this course to be a valuable resource and an anxiety reducer. I was surprised by the late inclusion of religious content, but was pleased with the approach and delivery of its inclusion. Recognizing that Jesus can be discussed as a teacher regardless of religious beliefs is good, but at one point the lecturer referred to Gods view of students and I found that to be reproachable. Otherwise great resource!

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.

Valuable

I’m a second year teacher and although this is geared toward higher Ed, I found this just as valuable for teaching middle school. The narrator is great, I could listen to him talk all day. He’s also very knowledgeable and intelligent. He seems to truly care about the art of teaching. I highly recommend this for anyone that teaches professionally at any level.

Well developed, familiar and practical.

The course is very practical and reflexive at the same time. It has wonderful insights on teaching and it is so down to earth that you can immediately start practicing what you listen

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.