Anna Neumann – författare

Most organizational theorists use the athletic team as a metaphor for the effective work group - specific players motivated to give their best performance in pursuit of a common goal. This book offers a different model, focusing instead on the complex ways that members of a leadership team interact, wield power, use language and create meaning. The authors describe the team as a culture and argue that effective team leadership depends on expecting, understanding and appreciating the differences among individuals. Based on interviews with members of administrative teams on 15 campuses - including research universities, public colleges, private colleges and community colleges - the book examines teamwork as an essentially human activity. It considers how and why people on leadership teams think and act as they do, how they learn and communicate (or neglect to do so), and how they bring their deepest values, beliefs and aspirations into play in the conduct of administrative work. The authors describe how administrative leaders shape and maintain effective teams, and how the teams address diversity and conflict.Emphasizing the importance of inclusiveness, the authors identify a number of hidden dynamics related to gender, race and power inequity. The book contains a number of quotes from team participants.

Research, teaching, service, and public outreach-all are aspects of being a tenured professor. But this list of responsibilities is missing a central component: actual scholarly learning-disciplinary knowledge that faculty teach, explore in research, and share with the academic community. How do professors pursue such learning when they must give their attention as well to administrative and other obligations? Professing to Learn explores university professors' scholarly growth and learning in the years immediately following the award of tenure, a crucial period that has a lasting impact on the academic career. Some launch from this point to multiple accomplishments and accolades, while others falter, their academic pursuits stalled. What contributes to these different outcomes? Drawing on interviews with seventy-eight professors in diverse disciplines and fields at five major American research universities, Anna Neumann describes how tenured faculty shape and disseminate their own disciplinary knowledge while attending committee meetings, grading exams, holding office hours, administering programs and departments, and negotiating with colleagues.By exploring the intellectual activities pursued by these faculty and their ongoing efforts to develop and define their academic interests, Professing to Learn directs the attention of higher education professionals and policy makers to the core aim of higher education: the creation of academic knowledge through research, teaching, and service.

How what we know about K–12 education can revolutionize learning in college.Honorable Mention in the Foreword INDIES Award for Education by FOREWORD Reviews, Winner of the 2021 Bronze IPPY Award for Education IIAmid the wide-ranging public debate about the future of higher education is a tension about the role of the faculty as instructors versus researchers and the role of teaching in the mission of a university. What is absent from that discourse is any clear understanding of what constitutes good teaching in college. In Convergent Teaching, masterful professors of education Aaron M. Pallas and Anna Neumann make the case that American higher education must hold fast to its core mission of fostering learning and growth for all people.Arguing that colleges and universities do this best through their teaching function, the book portrays teaching as a professional practice that teachers should actively hone. Drawing on rich research on K–12 classroom teaching, the authors develop the novel idea of convergent teaching, an approach that attends simultaneously to what students are learning and the personal, social, and cultural contexts shaping this process. Convergent teaching, they write, spurs teachers to join students' cognitions with the students' emotions and identities as they learn. Offering new ways to think about how college teachers can support and advance their students' learning of core disciplinary ideas, Pallas and Neumann outline targeted actions that campus administrators, public policy makers, and foundation leaders can take to propel such efforts. Vivid examples of instructors enacting three key principles—targeting, surfacing, and navigating—help bring the idea of convergent teaching to life.Full of research-based, practical ideas for better teaching and learning, Convergent Teaching presents numerous instances of successful campus-based initiatives. It also sets a bold agenda for disciplinary organizations, philanthropies, and the federal government to support teaching improvement. This book will challenge higher education students while motivating college administrators and faculty to enact change on their campuses.