1st Edition
Teaching Complex Ideas How to Translate Your Expertise into Great Instruction
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.