This is my only chance to write to you informally about the assumptions I hold about teaching and the decisions I have made about this book. Gaining a better grasp of these assumptions and decisions will help you to read these pages with more understanding.

First, I believe that most teachers who work at the postsecondary level want to be good teachers. Although other interests--scholarly and personal--may drain away energies that could be put into better teaching, most teachers are attracted to postsecondary instruction because of a love for their field of study and their desire to communicate it. Thus, this book is rather upbeat, perhaps even naive in its assumption that most teachers want to improve. Some earlier readers of the manuscript have noted this, pointing out that the tone is overly optimistic. What is the alternative: to write a "gloomy" book about college teaching? That would be out of character for me and probably not very useful for you; so let me acknowledge initially that I seem not to have taken into account the "dark side" of the professorate. I have chosen to write about what can be done, not to lament what cannot.

Second, I believe that many teachers are already good at something, but that they tend to do their one good thing over and over again. At the end of one of my workshops on teaching strategies, an economist said to me: "I believe I am very good at the one thing I do. Now I realize that I could do many more things and that I could be very good at them, too." The comment made me happy, because it captured the essence of what I was trying to achieve. The improvement of postsecondary teaching, it seems to me, depends on many teachers using many more options than they currently use.

Third, most postsecondary teachers lack a conceptual framework for thinking about and talking about their teaching. They are deluged with endless exhortation to be better teachers and are given fragments of advice, but no conceptual framework, no consistent instructional model, no system for incorporating the bits and pieces of advice into an overall scheme that makes sense. I have tried to provide that conceptual framework in this book, and I believe that having a framework, with clear reference points, is important for being able to organize and evaluate all the advice we are given about teaching.

Fourth, most efforts to improve teaching focus on teaching, without much discussion of learning. This is a book about how people learn. It is not an educational psychology text, but it is like such texts in emphasizing learning. The goal in writing this book has been to pull together what is known about learning and translate it into a form that is useful for college teachers. Thus, there is a deeper discussion of the relationship of teaching and learning here than is found in most books on college teaching.

Fifth, I included examples in each chapter--examples of teachers and institutions in the "perspective" chapters and examples of actual teaching in the "teaching strategies" chapters. These examples involved some difficult choices. I chose to make the examples fictional, rather than actual, because I wanted to illustrate ideal applications of each teaching strategy. I also chose typical subjects, settings, and students, and typical teachers to illustrate the teaching. I wanted typical situations to increase the credibility of the illustration. Unfortunately, "typical" can sometimes be read as "stereotypical," and early readers of the manuscript pointed this out. The last thing I want to do is portray ethnic or gender stereotypes, and I understand clearly that ethnic minorities and women appear in many roles and at all levels of the higher education system today. But for the reasons mentioned above, the illustrations I generated are more typical than atypical. I'm hoping that readers will be able to say, "Yes, that makes sense; I've known someone like that." I also chose to develop in detail three vivid examples for each teaching strategy, rather than to proliferate several examples that are treated only superficially. This choice requires readers to "leap" from the examples provided to their own fields and instructional situations. I believe such a leap is not difficult for most teachers, but it takes some imagination. It is important to read the examples and not skip over them; try to extract from them the principles, techniques, and activities that will work in your own field.

Sixth, I synthesized the work of many scholars in many fields, and quoted, paraphrased, or otherwise "boiled down" in some form original work from many sources. This book is a work of synthesis and translation, and what is "original" in my work is the creation of a conceptual framework, the development of the illustrations, and the clear explication of other people's ideas. For this reason, I am more indebted than most authors to the work of other scholars, the real backbone and substance of this book. I very carefully established exact quotations where they occur, but I also did much summarizing and paraphrasing. Where I did so I tried to indicate clearly in the notes the sources of these ideas. In the cases where extended descriptions and summaries appear, I want to acknowledge, once again, my dependence on the work of these scholars. In my efforts to produce readable and readily understandable summaries, I hope I have not done violence to the authors' original intentions. Where extended summaries are presented, I encourage readers to seek the original text for a deeper and more detailed understanding.