Teachers have busy schedules. Lessons planning, grading, meetings, and all sorts of activities crowd their day. Once a course is created, the temptation to copy and paste the same lesson plans year after year can be hard to resist. Who wants to do all that work over again? This is where James M. Lang comes in. In Small Teaching, he suggests small modifications to your lesson plans that can make a big difference in student learning.

The science of learning is an active field, yielding new insight regularly. Lang synthesizes current research in three categories: knowledge, understanding, and inspiration, before offering some models for integrating these findings. Most valuable for time-strapped teachers is the end of each chapter where he gives “Small Teaching Quick Tips.” These tips are easy to experiment with throughout the semester.

Small Teaching is worth adding to your professional development plan. It has the potential to confirm some of your intuitions and challenge you to think more broadly about how students learn.

Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, 2021.