Book review: Small teaching: everyday lessons from the science of learning

Small Teaching presents research-based, relatively easy to implement teaching practices and course design principles that should help improve student learning. The author offers a mixture of stories about teaching, summaries of research, and practical ideas for applying evidence-based teaching approaches. He lays out a set of chapters that each focus on a different approach or technique that has had a demonstrable research-based positive impact (primarily in higher education), and that he as a teacher has used or observed in practice. Small teaching approaches are by-design quick to employ for teachers in almost any subject. They are either brief activities that might take 5-10 minutes of a class, or perhaps up to one full class period. They also might be simple modifications to course design or communication styles that would not require a significant altering of a course and might be thought of more as a tweak or a fine-tuning that could often be applied the next time you step into a classroom.