The CAE Book Club is an opportunity to meet with peers and engage in discussions using a particular book as a catalyst for professional learning. The Book Club is open to all faculty and virtual/hybrid options are available for meetings.

For more information, please contact cae@stclaircollege.ca.

Spring 2024

 

How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. Susan M. Brookhart.

Properly crafted and individually tailored feedback on student work boosts student achievement across subjects and grades. In this updated and expanded second edition of her best-selling book, Susan M. Brookhart offers enhanced guidance and three lenses for considering the effectiveness of feedback: (1) does it conform to the research, (2) does it offer an episode of learning for the student and teacher, and (3) does the student use the feedback to extend learning? In this comprehensive guide for teachers at all levels, you will find information on every aspect of feedback, including

Strategies to uplift and encourage students to persevere in their work.
How to formulate and deliver feedback that both assesses learning and extends instruction.
When and how to use oral, written, and visual as well as individual, group, or whole-class feedback.
A concise and updated overview of the research findings on feedback and how they apply to today's classrooms.
In addition, the book is replete with examples of good and bad feedback as well as rubrics that you can use to construct feedback tailored to different learners, including successful students, struggling students, and English language learners.

The vast majority of students will respond positively to feedback that shows you care about them and their learning. Whether you teach young students or teens, this book is an invaluable resource for guaranteeing that the feedback you give students is engaging, informative, and, above all, effective.

Fall 2023
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. Stephen A. Brookfield.

The revised second edition of the landmark book, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, offers an updated guide for faculty to the process of becoming critically reflective teachers. Filled with practical tools and expert insight, this volume helps facilitate a journey of constructive self-critique. Stephen Brookfield―the award-winning educator and bestselling author―explains how to confront the ­contradictions involved in creating democratic classrooms by using critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development. He explains the best way to unearth and scrutinize teaching assumptions by using four specific lenses: students’ eyes, colleagues’ perceptions, relevant theory and research, and personal experience.

Targeting faculty at all levels and across disciplines, this personal guide explores how practicing critical reflection can help align faculty with desired student outcomes, to view their practice from new perspectives, and engage learners by using varied teaching formats. Critical reflection can also aid in understanding and managing classroom power dynamics, modeling critical thinking for students, as well as working with the complexities of diverse classrooms.

This revised second edition includes a wealth of new material and contains chapters on such timely topics as critical reflection in the context of social media, teaching race and racism, leadership in a critically reflective key, and team teaching as critical reflection. All chapters have been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect today’s classroom formats, whether online or face-to-face, or in large ­lectures or small groups.

Written for any educator willing to challenge their own assumptions, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher offers the foundational information and practical tools needed for teachers to reach their true potential.

Spring 2023

 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of the Plains. Robin Wall Kimmerer.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

ontent

Fall 2022

 

Inclusive Teaching Book Cover

Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom (Hogan & Sathy, 2022) 

 

 

 

 

In a book written by and for college teachers, Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy provide tips and advice on how to make all students feel welcome and included. They begin with a framework describing why explicit attention to structure enhances inclusiveness in both course design and interactions between students. Inclusive Teaching then provides practical ways to include more voices in a series of contexts: when giving instructions for group work and class activities, holding office hours, communicating with students, and more. The authors finish with an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what evidence to include in a teaching dossier that demonstrates inclusive practices.