Other Teaching Resources From Around the Web
There are many online pedagogical resources that will inspire you with best-practices for learning!
National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity
The NCFDD provides online professional development and mentoring tools to help everyone succeed in academia. UMass Amherst has an institutional membership, which means that much of the programming is free to you as a member of the UMass community (be sure to indicate your UMass Amherst affiliation when you create an account). They offer live and on-demand webinars. Check out their resources aimed at graduate students and postdocs.
Blog Posts about Teaching College
There are many online pedagogical resources that will inspire instructors with best-practices for learning. For example, Faculty Focus regularly publishes short articles on effective teaching strategies for the college classroom and the publications The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed both have advice sections that often publish on pedagogy and teaching as a career. Want concrete and creative teaching suggestions delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up for Barbi Honeycutt's newsletter!
Pedagogy Books
Some of our favorite books on pedagogy include:
- Small Teaching (2016) by James Lang
- Small Teaching Online (2019) by Flower Darby & James Lang
- Distracted (2020) by James Lang
- Student Engagement Techniques (2020) by Claire Major & Elizabeth Barkley
- Collaborative Learning Techniques (2014) by Elizabeth Barkley, Claire Major, and K. Patricia Cross
- Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011) by John C. Bean
We have linked to the publisher’s webpage, but all of these are available electronically from the UMass library.
Student Workload Estimator
As you are planning readings and assignments, you may be wondering how much work to assign. The expectation for students is that they spend 1-3 hours outside of class per credit hour. This Student Workload Estimator tool (developed first by Rice University) can help you estimate the workload for different types of assignments - if you plug in the number of pages of reading or writing, it will estimate the time it will take the average student to complete the work.