In Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt argues that courses can and should be designed to present students with what are known as “wicked problems” because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college. As the author puts it, “this book begins with the assumption that what we all want for our students is that they be capable of changing the world....When a student leaves college, we want them to enter the world not as drones participating mindlessly in activities to which they’ve been appointed, but as thinking, deliberative beings who add something to society.”There’s a lot of talk in education these days about “wicked problems”—problems that defy traditional expectations or knowledge, problems that evolve over time: Zika, ISIS, political discourse in the era of social media. To prepare students for such wicked problems, they need to have wicked competencies, the ability to respond easily and on the fly to complex challenges. Unfortunately, a traditional education that focuses on content and skills often fails to achieve this sense of wickedness. Students memorize for the test, prepare for the paper, practice the various algorithms over and over again—but when the parameters or dynamics of the test or the paper or the equation change, students are often at a loss for how to adjust.This is a course design book centered on the idea that the goal in the college classroom—in all classrooms, all the time—is to develop students who are not just loaded with content, but capable of using that content in thoughtful, deliberate ways to make the world a better place. Achieving this goal requires a top-to-bottom reconsideration of courses, including student learning goals, text selection and course structure, day-to-day pedagogies, and assignment and project design. Creating Wicked Students takes readers through each step of the process, providing multiple examples at each stage, while always encouraging instructors to consider concepts and exercises in light of their own courses and students.

With a focus on providing concrete teaching strategies for scholars, the Handbook on Teaching and Learning in Political Science and International Relations blends both theory and practice in an accessible and clear manner. In an effort to help faculty

By 2020, half of the world's population and most university students will have a supercomputer in their pockets. This revolution will affect the way students respond to higher education. The university classroom must henceforth engage students, and the classic lecture format alone might not be enough to do so. This book answers the question how university students can learn in the classroom what they cannot learn in any other way. The answer is inspired by options that are not available to political scientists - in the way that they are in the laboratories for the sciences, in the performances for the live arts, and in the studios for visual arts - as well as ideas that are already present, but not widespread in the discipline: problem-solving and case studies, as in the professional schools, and simulation exercises in many other disciplines. This book proposes therefore an active pedagogy for political science, at a time when active pedagogy is more important than ever. Prof. Laure Paquette, PhD, has been a visiting researcher or professor in 23 countries. She has advised several foreign governments as well as her own, Canada, and has published extensively in four languages. This is her sixteenth book.

This comprehensive guide captures important trends in international relations (IR) pedagogy, paying particular attention to innovations in active learning and student engagement for the contemporary International Relations IR classroom.

Teaching Civic Engagement provides an exploration of key theoretical discussions, innovative ideas, and best practices in educating citizens in the 21st century. The book addresses theoretical debates over the place of civic engagement education in Political Science. It offers pedagogical examples in several sub-fields, including evidence of their effectiveness and models of appropriate assessment. Written by political scientists from a range of institutions and subfields, Teaching Civic Engagement makes the case that civic and political engagement should be a central part of our mission as a discipline.

There are a plethora of books that aim to teach the research methods needed for political science. Thinking Like a Political Scientist stands out from them in its conviction that students are better served by learning a handful of core lessons well rather than trying to memorize hundreds of often statistical definitions. Short and concise, the book has two main parts, Asking Good Questions and Generating Good Answers. In the first section, one chapter each is devoted to the three fundamental questions in political science: who cares?, what happened?, and why?. These take up, among many other topics, crafting a literature review, creating hypotheses, measuring concepts, and the difference between correlation and causation. The second section of the book has chapters about choosing a research design, choosing cases, working with written documents, and working with numbers. All of these are essential skills for undergraduates to have when reading published work and conducting their own research. Every chapter ends with several exercises where students can read examples from published work and develop their own skills as researchers. Finally, unlike most research methods books, Christopher Howard s sprinkles humor and surprising analogies throughout."