Review of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, by David Gooblar
Gooblar, David. (2019). The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
272 pages, Hardcover, $29.95
Tyler Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA., USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com
In his new book The Missing Course, David Gooblar writes toward college teachers and administrators alike when he asserts that a more student-centered learning environment is far more effective than a lecture-based classroom. Applied active learning, he asserts, is crucial to student success. Unlike much recent pedagogy scholarship, which contends that a lecture-based classroom is standard for a reason (time-honored “effectiveness,” efficiency, routine), Gooblar favors an engaged and immersive experiential style of teaching. He argues that “[i]n the not-too-distant future, it is now imaginable that researchers will refuse to study lectures as a mode of teaching because to do so would be an unethical imposition on the poor students who have to suffer through them.” He emphasizes this point by noting that some pedagogy scholars are already beginning to agree, and (like him) are treating the experiential model as a foregone conclusion, moving from “the active learning versus lecturing question and focus[ing] instead on determining what kinds of active learning work best” (p. 15). Continue Reading →
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