Teaching What You Don’t Know

A confidence-builder and strategy guide for anyone who has to stand up in front of a class and teach a topic for the first time.

“This is one of the best books I’ve read on university teaching and learning in a long time. It addresses an issue that’s seldom discussed, in a book that’s both carefully researched and wonderfully sparkling in style.”

—Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you’re lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You’ve taught Kant for twenty years, but now you’re team-teaching a brand new course on “Ethics in a Global Pandemic.”

Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don’t know very well.

The challenges are even greater when students don’t share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.

In this practical and funny book, Therese Huston offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don’t have a clue how to answer a question?

Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn’t come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students’ understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don’t know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It’s an adventure.

“Have you ever been asked to deliver a lecture at short notice on a topic that is outside your comfort zone? …If so, read this book. In fact, ever found yourself wondering how you could improve your teaching, even of topics well within your expertise? Again, if so, read this book.”

—Celia Popovic, Innovations in Education and Teaching International
“Moving behind the reassuring public image of professorial expertise, Huston exposes a growing but still largely hidden academic reality: university teachers–sometimes even full professors–teaching outside of their field. Interviews with dozens of university faculty convincingly establish the prevalence of the practice and clarify the institutional reasons that it will likely increase in the years ahead.”

—Bryce Christensen, Booklist

Teaching What You Don’t Know

“This is one of the best books I’ve read on university teaching and learning in a long time. It addresses an issue that’s seldom discussed, in a book that’s both carefully researched and wonderfully sparkling in style.”

Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don’t know very well.

“Have you ever been asked to deliver a lecture at short notice on a topic that is outside your comfort zone? …If so, read this book. In fact, ever found yourself wondering how you could improve your teaching, even of topics well within your expertise? Again, if so, read this book.”

Therese Huston