CTL Reading Room Now Catalogued through MacPháidín Library

Looking for a teaching-related resource?  Curious what books we have in the CTL’s Reading Room?  Thanks to the hard work of the Stonehill librarians, the CTL’s resource collection is now catalogued through the MacPháidín Library on-line catalogue and so is easier than ever to access.

You can even search specifically within the CTL’s collection.  Simply, go to the “Advanced Keyword Search” page, and then under “Location,” select “Center — Teaching & Learning.”  Then your search will only pull up books available through the CTL:

New in the CTL library: How to Write A Lot

Part of the American Psychological Association’s “LifeTools” series, Paul Silva’s How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing is a quick read that just might convince you that you can find time to write, even while juggling a 3-3 teaching load.

For those familiar with Robert Boice’s Advice for New Faculty Members and Joan Balker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day (both also in the CTL library), Silva’s central advice isn’t anything new: make a writing schedule and stick to it.

In the CTL Library: Teaching with Your Mouth Shut

Donald Finkel’s Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Heinemann, 2000) is both a teacher’s reflection on his life in the classroom and a useful guide for creating a more student-centered classroom.

Since I first added it to the CTL’s collection in the Faculty Reading Room, Finkel’s book has been incredibly popular with Stonehill faculty.

The McGraw Center at Princeton provides a concise summary of Finkel’s main points:

New in the CTL library: Carol Dweck on Mindset

Now in the Faculty Reading Room is Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006).  Written for a popular audience, Mindset provides an overview of Dweck’s work of the past thirty years examining why some people are more likely to reach their potential than others.

Dweck’s major finding is that some people are more likely to understand traits, such as intelligence, talent, and ability, as fixed, while others see in them the possibility for growth.

For example, those with a “fixed” mindset believe that intelligence is a static, inherent trait that one either has or doesn’t.  Those with a “growth” mindset, on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be developed and improved upon with effort.

Dweck’s research shows that growth-oriented people are more likely to fulfill their potential.

New in the CTL library: JECT special issue on “Diversity and Inclusion on Campus”

The latest issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching (Volume 19, Numbers 2 & 3) is now on the shelves in the CTL’s Faculty Reading Room.

This special issue on “Diversity and Inclusion on Campus” includes articles such as:

“Learning about whiteness in a first-year seminar: Challenging self and others”
Lawrence, S. M., & Pliner, S. M.

The authors chronicle the experiences of undergraduates, both white and of color, learning about whiteness in a first-year seminar. Over a three-year period, they collected students’ reflection papers written in conjunction with a self-interview assignment and analyzed them qualitatively. Findings revealed that the new learning first-year students acquired about race, racism, and whiteness had varying levels of significance for them.

Browse the CTL library online

Those of you who have stopped by the Faculty Reading Room in recent months have seen the growing collection of teaching resources the CTL has been accumulating.

These books are available for check-out to all Stonehill Faculty.

In order to make it easier for you to browse what’s available in the CTL’s library, Patricia Neagle and I have been working to upload the collection to LibraryThing.com, an online book cataloging site.

There you can browse through the CTL’s resource collection or search via keyword. Pat and I are still working out the kinks — and we have plenty of tagging yet to do in order to make the search function more comprehensive — but we think it’s already a pretty useful tool.

Please let either Pat or me know of any feedback you have about the LibraryThing catalog. And if you have a suggestion for a book to add to the CTL’s collection, please contact us!

New in the CTL library: Service Learning for Civic Engagement

Two new titles have recently been added to the CTL library, both from the Service Learning For Civic Engagement series from Stylus Publishing:

Race, Poverty, and Social Justice: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Through Service Learning (2007) and Gender Identity, Equity, and Violence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Through Service Learning (2007) collect essays written by service learning educators who teach from social justice and feminist pedagogy perspectives. Scanning a range of disciplines (philosophy, criminal justice, education, psychology, communication, engineering, and ethnic studies are just a few) and a variety of service learning partnerships, the articles discuss the organization and outcomes of particular service learning courses dealing with social justice issues.

Each book includes a chart that makes it easy to identify which essays are most pertinent to an instructor’s particular disciplinary or service focus, and the chapters are well organized to make for easy reading.

If you’re interested in looking over either volume, they are available for check-out from the CTL (in Duffy 114). Or take a break to brew yourself a cup of coffee in our reading room and look through them here!