Teaching within the rhythms of the semester / Donna Killian Duffy, Janet Wright Jones.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-251) and index.

Prelude to the semester -- Exploring teaching styles -- Creating magic in the classroom -- Stalking the superior syllabus -- Tempo of the semester -- The opening weeks: establishing community -- The interim weeks: beating the doldrums -- The final weeks: achieving closure.

Teaching Within the Rhythms of the Semester is a unique and far-reaching guide to teaching and learning that is organized around the ebbs and flows of energy that occur within the time frame of a course. It combines a lively and innovative balance of theory and application with practical techniques for creating successful learning experiences at each stage in a semester. Duffy and Jones discuss ways of teaching and ways of learning. They model practices that instructors at every level may use to get off to a good beginning, maintain motivation in the mid-semester doldrums, and achieve successful closure at the end. Duffy and Jones offer an excellent synthesis of the principles behind effective teaching. Each chapter opens with a vignette that illustrates some of the challenges teachers encounter in the classroom and the ways both they and their students respond to them. These realistic and engaging narratives are followed by a discussion of the educational, cognitive, and affective theories at work, as well as concrete suggestions - more than one hundred throughout the book - for similar classroom situations.