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From the author: James M. Lang
I'm the author of six books focused on teaching and learning, including the bestselling Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2nd ed) and the more recent Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books). I write a monthly column on teaching and learning for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and have published essays or reviews in Time, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, America, Commonweal, and more. I have given more than two hundred conference keynotes, presentations, or workshops for university and college faculty and secondary school educators. I'm the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist Grant (Colombia, 2016) and have consulted on the development of educational materials for the United Nations.
I spent twenty years as an English professor at Assumption University, before deciding to step away from full-time teaching to focus on my writing. But during the two years I spent on my own, I sorely missed the intellectual life of a college campus. In the fall of 2023, I began a half-time, hybrid position in the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame. I spend a full week on campus every month, and another week working remotely.
My next book, Writing Like a Teacher, focuses on how nonfiction writers can expand the audiences for their work. It will be available from the University of Chicago Press in early 2025. You can also find my work on Substack, in a monthly series of essays pairing works of philosophy and literature with questions in higher education.
The Small Teaching movement began in 2016, when this unassuming book made a simple argument to college faculty: a growing body of research on human learning was pointing us to small, manageable changes we could make to our teaching that would have a significant positive impact on student learning. Since its publication in 2016, higher education faculty around the world have embraced its message of empowerment and hope, and used its theoretically grounded, highly practical recommendations to spark ongoing change for their students. Although the book was written with an audience of college faculty in mind, it has been embraced by secondary educators as well, especially those interested in preparing their students to succeed in higher education.
“The notion that amazing teaching can come as a result of making small, research-based changes seems simple, but it has the potential to empower many in higher education. James Lang has done us all a great service by providing strategies that allow us to be more efficient and effective in the classroom without overhauling our entire approach to teaching.”
The book makes its case for small teaching changes by introducing nine learning strategies that have been demonstrated as highly effective for college and secondary students in the research literature. Each chapter introduces one of those strategies with an engaging, personal narrative or example from the author’s life or classroom; offers an easy-to-read theoretical overview of its mechanics; and then provides multiple practical examples of how that principle could be implemented in practical, easy-to-implement strategies for course design and classroom practice.
“James Lang’s Small Teaching manages to distill volumes of educational research into practical strategies that can be put to use immediately, without having to remake your whole course. I expect I’ll be seeing well-thumbed copies on professors’ bookshelves for years to come.”
— David Gooblar, Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Temple University, Author of The Missing Course
Contact: Stephanie Long: stephanie.long@austincc.edu
Faculty Center for Learning Innovation (FCLI)
Contact: Janey Flanagan, janey.flanagan@austincc.edu
Small Teaching
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Cheating Lessons
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