1st Edition

Teaching Complex Ideas How to Translate Your Expertise into Great Instruction

By Arnold Wentzel Copyright 2019
    250 Pages 50 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    250 Pages 50 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Integrating insights from learning science with practical guidelines and stepwise approaches, Teaching Complex Ideas helps educators masterfully translate their expertise into easy-to-understand, interesting, and memorable instruction. Covering areas such as identifying the critical ideas within a complex topic, designing clear explanations, and making lectures useful and engaging, this resource brings together subjects and skills never before adequately addressed in a single book. Using real world examples and full of practical tips, this book guides college instructors to improve their understanding of their subjects, select the most valuable ideas to teach, and integrate those concepts with other aspects of teaching such as presentation design, technology, and assessment of understanding. This practical book helps professors at any stage in their career convert even the most complex ideas into great teaching.

    List of Figures

    List of Tables

    Preface

    Acknowledgments

    Chapter 1: Know what not to teach

    Chapter 2: What makes an explanation great?

    Chapter 3: A step-by-step approach to explain complex ideas clearly

    Chapter 4: Help students to remember creatively and forget as much as possible

    Chapter 5: How to make boring and complex ideas interesting

    Chapter 6: If you want students to reason like experts, don’t teach them how to reason

    Chapter 7: Transform assessments into learning experiences and eliminate cheating

    Chapter 8: Create valid conventional assessments but consider alternatives

    Chapter 9: Rethink educational technology by noticing what everyone else misses

    Chapter 10: Design presentations that make your lectures much more useful

    Chapter 11: The future of professor-experts

    Biography

    Arnold Wentzel is Professor of Innovation Methodology, Management, and Research Writing in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering at the Universidad Antonio Nariño, Colombia.