A SoTL Bibliography for Job-Seeking Doctoral Candidates

Return to Small Classes

Job-Seeking Doctoral Candidate Resources

  • How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

    Ambrose and company’s informative volume focuses on the integration of teaching and research, guiding the reader through seven chapters each of which addresses a question (e.g., “How does students’ prior knowledge affect their learning?” and “How do students become self-directed learners?”). This is a fast, informative read, but also useful for troubleshooting courses that don’t turn out to be as effective as planned. By focusing on redesigning a course, issue by issue raised in this book, one can use it to refine repeatedly-taught courses semester by semester.

  • The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Lea…

    Bean’sworkbook-sized work is not only full of useful content that has helped me more effectively incorporate writing into classroom interaction, but its size makes it a handy reference that can be spread out on a workspace while one designs or redesigns an upcoming course. Intrinsic to Bean’s thinking is the notion that writing is a form of critical thinking, and that students who are prompted to engage in writing practices in the classroom are being prompted to think in ways that help them succeed in producing the kinds of work that instructors assess. His last section, which addresses grading practices, is a good preface to Walvoord’s and Anderson’s Effective Grading.

  • Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate

    One of the Ur-texts of SoTL thinking, Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered offers a useful twentieth-century history of teaching’s and research’s relationship within the university sector. Perhaps most useful in terms of a job search is Boyer’s distinction between various forms of scholarship, including the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching. His arguments for the scholarship of teaching did important work to re-imbue the practice with dignity at a time when few voices were speaking with him in pointing out the ways that federal research funding had supplanted teaching as a valued practice on campus.

  • Evaluation of the Professoriate

    Glassic’s and company’s work expounds on Boyer’s arguing that the scholarship of teaching, if documented and framed appropriately, constitutes a real contribution to disciplinary knowledge on the grounds that it adheres to the same standards of scholarly work as Bloyer’s scholarships of discovery, integration, and application, namely: (1) clear goals, (2) adequate preparation, (3) appropriate methods, (4) significant results, (5) effective presentation, and (6) reflective critique. The authors helpfully explain how these criteria apply to the scholarship of teaching, thereby elucidating the practice and making it more accessible to a new practitioner. As with many of the other texts on this bibliography, this work provides a helpful vocabulary for talking about one’s teaching with a variety of prospective colleagues, both faculty and administration.

  • he Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons

    The boom of on-campus teaching and learning centers over the past fifteen years was fueled by the scholarship of Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings, two of the early influencers of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) that originated at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, CA. This book cast vision for the development of such centers and the sorts of conversations they could host. As such, this book is valuable context for any Ph.D. with a job search that might include part- or full-time work in a teaching and learning center. Since many centers are not budgeted for multiple full-time employees, it’s not uncommon to find positions in teaching and learning centers that are part-time, with the remainder of a full-time position made up by the budget of a resident scholar’s academic department. Knowing how to explain one’s work in terms of how it would benefit both an academic department and a teaching and learning center is a valuable rhetorical strategy in preparing for a job talk.

  • The Course Portfolio: How Faculty Can Examine Their Teaching to Advance Practic…

    Although the idea of a teaching portfolio is no longer novel, learning the merits and best practices associated with writing a document in which one reflects on one's course and assignment designs and identifies horizons for future improvement is still a valuable endeavor. Whereas in 1998 when this was written teaching portfolios tended to be done in hard copy, many now exist in web-based archives, lending transparency to university course designs and college classrooms, a crucial transparency that reassures colleagues, parents of prospective students, and even state legislators who are deciding on funding that productive attention is being paid to what goes on in the classroom, which is a large share of the public good that education poses for the taxpayer and the tuition payer. In this collection, Lee Shulman’s essay “Course Anatomy: The Dissection and Analysis of Knowledge Through Teaching”, Mary Taylor Huber’s essay “Why Now? Course Portfolios in Context”, and Daniel Bernstein’s essay “Putting the Focus on Student Learning” may all be useful for the job-seeking Ph.D.

  • Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers

    Perhaps most useful in James’s and Brookfield’s book is the section titled “Understanding the Role of Imagination in Learning”, which offers a useful three chapters on the ways that creativity cultivates reflective thinking, a skill that aids metacognition and a high-morale, playful classroom environment.

  • Walvoord, Barbara E., and Virginia Johnson Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool …

    Walvoord’s and Anderson’s workbook-style publication is both a helpful read and a useful desk reference for those thinking about grading. Not only does their treatment of grading address classroom- related topics like time management and communicating grades to students, it also offers a helpful three chapters that situate grading in the larger context of the growing drive to assess student learning at the department and campus levels. For a job-searching Ph.D. this book will not only help the reader think about her/his grading practices, it will also offer insights into how to talk with department chairs, deans, and provosts about how one’s classroom practices will contribute to institutional understanding of factors that contribute to first-year retention and time-to-degree.

  • Weimer, Maryellen. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice

    While Weimer’s book may be viewed by some as radical, her helpful focus on the balance of power in the classroom and the implications of that balance for students’ learning insightfully teases out some of the problems that confront an academe that insists on retaining pedagogies and practices that date back to the late nineteenth century. Of particular interest to a job-searching Ph.D. might be her chapter “Responding to Resistance”, which offers a vocabulary and arguments for this newer view of pedagogy, rhetorical tools that may be useful in talking about one’s teaching in a job talk or other on-campus interview contexts.

  • Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design

    Though somewhat dated now, Understanding by Design remains a standard workhorse in the trove of teaching tools for many instructors. Of particular import is Wiggins’s and McTighe’s concept of “backward design”, a method that prompts the reader to identify course goals, write assignments whose learning goals align with the course goals, and then work backward to plan the day-to-day work that students will accomplish as they work toward completing assignments. Published in workbook format, Understanding by Design is both an insightful read and a useful reference tool during the pre-semester course design process, and thus should be kept ready to hand.