This compilation of essays from some of Virginia Tech’s finest professors illustrates how teaching excellence can be achieved in the face of large classes and the demand to produce meaningful scholarship. The 39 faculty members featured in Teaching Excellence at a Research-Centered University belong to Virginia Tech’s Academy of Teaching Excellence, and their essays provide wonderful, very personal insights into the qualities that define outstanding teachers.

As these writers show, excellent research, teaching, and outreach can coexist and reinforce one another in a highly productive way for the benefit of students. These essays propose that the best teachers are usually engaged in productive research and creative scholarship, and the reader is offered ideas about how to integrate research with teaching assignments.

The book’s subtitle, Energy, Empathy, and Engagement in the Classroom, captures the common themes that emerge from the essays:

Energy: Effective teachers are energetic, enthusiastic, and passionate—but more than that, they bring out the same attributes in their students. The essays in this text offer techniques for creating an exciting and energetic classroom climate through dynamic and enlightening demonstrations, peer-to-peer discussions, and teacher-student exchanges.

Empathy: Practically every essay also reflects the importance of having empathy for students—from showing respect, kindness, and caring to linking the course material to relevant happenings in students’ lives. This is empathic or “humanistic” teaching.

Engagement: Energetic and empathic professors also promote engagement in the course material. Their goal is for students to attend class and study course material not just for a grade, but to become self-accountable, to learn for the sake of learning and self-improvement, and to look forward to attending every class.

The contributors to Teaching Excellence at a Research-Centered University offer a variety of practical ways to bring energy, empathy, and engagement to the university or college classroom. Implementing only a few of these methods will lead to more effective teaching and greater enjoyment and satisfaction as an educator, researcher, and scholar.