Teaching Strategies: A Guide to Effective Instruction

This text has several positives. It discusses how to plan, deliver, and assess a lesson. It incorporates issues such as multiple intelligences, emotional issues, cultural issues and so on. It gives the upcoming teacher a lot to mull over.

Another huge bonus is that the book is linked to the publisher's web site with videos from real classrooms and real teachers. You can actually see and hear the ideas in action. For me, that made a huge difference.

The down side that I found with this book is that the authors sometimes got lost in the details. What I mean by that is sometimes it was hard to understand how all the ideas, theories and processes were supposed to work together. I lost the big picture at times. The videos did help greatly with sorting that out though. However, there were places where I never felt like I totally got the big pictue. I would have liked to have more video clips.

Learned a lot from this book.

I purchased this book to use in a course on Learning Theory and Instructional Design and have found it to be perfect for my needs. Each chapter is well organized and provides an extensive bibliography with internet as well as print resources. The authors use charts and graphs to identify specific important concepts and provide reflective questions that can help the user organize their own knowledge base with the material presented. Good overall text covering planning and executing instruction.

I was assigned this book for a teaching certification course and I have never seen a worse textbook in my life. It's full of long lists of terms that are never explained. The visuals are confusing. It's incredibly wordy. I think the same information could easily be condensed down to a short pamplett if they just took out all of the redundancy.