Getting Started: A Pair of Books for New Teachers

by Erika Dreifus, Ph.D. It’s natural for beginning teachers to seek advice—where else?—in books. Peter Filene’s Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors, and James M. Lang’s Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year provide two recent additions to the how-to literature for new instructors. Both Filene, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Lang, assistant professor of English at Assumption College, are evidently familiar with the scholarship on pedagogy. Ken Bain, director of the New York University Center for Teaching Excellence, offers the foreword to Filene’s volume; […]