Kember, David, Rosa Ma, Carmel McNaught, et. al. Excellent University Teaching. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2006.

The book is touted as a “celebration of excellent teaching” (vii), helping to shine the spotlight on exemplary teachers and what they do which makes their teaching so successful.  The authors’ hope for doing so is that the practices of these exemplary teachers will become adopted as targets to meet and models to look up to, so that over time excellent teaching will be the norm at colleges and universities, rather than the exception.  The original project of the book was to produce a collection of stories from 18 professors who the authors took to be excellent teachers.  As the project progressed however, they found that there were common themes that connected one story to the next, and the book is a product of extracting those common themes.  These themes are found throughout the five main sections of the book: how these excellent teachers planned for their teaching and courses, what it is these teachers taught, how these teachers taught it, how these teachers motivated their students, and how they developed themselves as teachers.  It’s within these five main sections that the book explores what it calls the principles of excellent teaching.

Posted: Brandon Lee 12/18/08