The Missing Course

“What a delight to read David Gooblar’s book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure.”

—Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do

College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are taught to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom. There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. The Missing Course offers a field guide to the state-of-the-art in teaching and learning and is packed with insights to help students learn in any discipline.

Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to ways of designing courses to get students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much your students actually learn.

“Warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We’re so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide.”

—Sarah Rose Cavanagh, author of The Spark of Learning

“Goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“An invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We’ve needed this book for a long time.”

—John Warner, author of Why They Can’t Write