Books

The Five-Minute Time Manager for College Students

How to Turbo-Charge Your Academic and Personal Productivity

Are you scrambling to keep up with all of your work and gasping for more time to do it all? Do you have five minutes to spare? Then I have a time-tested, evidence-based plan used by CEOs and business managers that will automatically increase your free time by 20%. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student, but especially an incoming freshman, I bet you can use that time. You can execute the plan lickety split. Further, if you want to save more time, checkout any of the 45 other techniques that can easily be incorporated into your daily routine to streamline your studying, test preparation, and personal appointments. You can complete what you HAVE to do related to your courses, assignments, and laundry in much less time to allow to do what you WANT to do, such as attend sports events, parties, go snowboarding, rehearse for the spring play/musical, and finish your laundry. Imagine the feeling of being ahead, relaxed, and in control with buckets of free time to squander away. That`s what makes dreams and spring break vacations in Cancun possible. Alternatively, consider being behind, unprepared, pressured, and playing catch-up all of the time with the accompanying stress, tension, and frustration; you never have enough time and you are constantly rushed with little or no time for yourself or anybody else. That`s what makes nightmares and Freddy Krueger possible.

Paperback, $16.95 (Purchase directly from publisher)
E-book, $14.95 (Purchase directly from publisher)

Top Secret Tips for Successful Humor In the Workplace

How to Boost Productivity and Retention, Plus 25 Other Benefits

This is your owner`s manual for infusing humor into your department to create a "fun" work environment. There are more than 50 benefits to accrue from that infusion. In this book, you will get: (1) a step-by-step procedure for rolling out the humor initiative to your faculty and staff, (2) guidelines for setting standards for the types of appropriate humor that are in bounds in your department and the types of offensive humor that should be out of bounds, (3) 45 secret tips revealed only to you (and anyone else who buys the book) that will furnish every person in your department with the information to select and perform a variety of humor forms like a professional, (4) suggestions for applying these tips in meetings, presentations, and workshops, and in the classroom, and (5) a BONUS chapter on how to create TV, movie, and Broadway parodies that can be used in any of the preceding applications. There is also a kaleidoscope of 52 humor techniques provided in Tip 3, which involves taking risks with a variety of humor forms.

Paperback, $16.95 (Purchase directly from publisher)
E-book, $14.95 (Purchase directly from publisher)

Thirteen Strategies to Measure College Teaching

A Consumer`s Guide to Rating Scale Construction, Assessment, and Decision-Making for Faculty, Administrators, and Clinicians

Student ratings are a necessary, but not sufficient, source of evidence for measuring teaching effectiveness. This book is a fun-filled--but solidly evidence-based--romp through more than a dozen other methods. As the major stakeholders in this process, both faculty AND administrators, plus clinicians who teach in schools of medicine, nursing, and the allied health fields, need to be involved in writing, adapting, evaluating, or buying items to create the various scales to measure teaching performance. This is the first basic introduction in the faculty evaluation literature to take you step-by-step through the process to develop these tools, interpret their scores, and make decisions about teaching improvement, annual contract renewal/dismissal, merit pay, promotion, and tenure. It explains how to create appropriate, high quality items and detect those that can introduce bias and unfairness into the results.

Paperback, 1 57922 193 9, $24.95 (Purchase directly from the publisher)
Cloth, 1 57922 192 0, $65.00 (Purchase directly from the publisher)

Professors Are from Mars^®, Students Are from Snickers^®

How to Write and Deliver Humor in the Classroom and in Professional Presentations

Professors and students seem to come from different planets (or candy bars). Barriers frequently exist that impede their communication, such as age, income, and cholesterol level. Humor can break down these barriers so that professors can better connect with their students and other audiences. It can be used as a teaching tool to facilitate learning. Ron Berk describes and illustrates a wide variety of techniques that can be integrated systematically into instruction and professional presentations. Examples include humorous inserts in the course syllabus, cautions and warnings on handouts, humorous in-class and homework problems, humorous Q & A strategies, and game format test reviews. Higher risk methods are top 10 lists, M-C item jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, and humor in parking tickets and wedding invitations. For professors who consider themselves as "jocularly arthritic," this book provides a special feature: it is closed captioned for the humor-impaired.

Paperback, 1 57922 070 3, $24.95 (Purchase directly from the publisher)

Humor as an Instructional Defibrillator

Evidence-Based Techniques in Teaching and Assessment

Grab those paddles. Charge 300. Clear! "Ouch!" Now how do you feel? "Great!" Humor can be used as a systematic teaching or assessment tool in your classroom and course Web site. It can shock students to attention and bring deadly, boring course content to life. Since some students have the attention span of goat cheese, we need to find creative online and offline techniques to hook them, engage their emotions, and focus their minds and eyeballs on learning. One strategy is to conduct in-class demonstrations involving groups of students. Parodies of TV programs, movies, and Broadway shows with music and props linked to content material can create unforgettable learning experiences. The book provides a detailed and hilarious review of the research on humor and laughter and nearly 100 multiple-choice joke items to illustrate item writing rules. A comprehensive chapter on how to insert humor into course tests is also included.

Paperback, 1 57922 063 0, $24.95 (Purchase directly from the publisher)