Teaching what you don't know, paperback/therese huston

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now youre lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life.

Youve taught Kant for twenty years, but now youre team-teaching a new course on Ethics and the Internet.

The personality theorist retired and wasnt replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the Sexual Identity course.

Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they dont know very well.

The challenges are even greater when students dont share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.

In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems.

How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you dont have a clue how to answer a question? Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesnt come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge.

She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.

Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you dont know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job.

Its an adventure.