Submission guidelines

The Teaching Professor welcomes submissions on a variety of teaching and learning topics. These can take a diversity of forms: pragmatic, advice-driven articles; opinion pieces; thoughtful personal narratives; essays that explore controversial issues or raise questions about current practices; responses to articles we’ve recently published; book reviews; reading lists; or teaching tools (e.g., checklists, rubrics, and surveys).

We encourage you to write for The Teaching Professor even if you aren’t a widely published author. Many submissions come from first-time authors. Unlike other publishers, we’re interested in the techniques, strategies, approaches, and assignments that you’ve developed and that help your students learn. We are proud of our long history of being a place where teachers can and do learn from and with each other.

Currently, we accept about one in four submissions. Following these guidelines will improve your chances of acceptance:

• Write directly to the audience: fellow faculty who are serious about improving learning and who come from a broad range of disciplines and types of institutions.
• Focus on teaching and learning issues of general interest to faculty—ones relevant across disciplines. Field-specific articles won’t find a home in The Teaching Professor.
• Keep the article short and to the point—generally, in the 800–1,000-word range.
• Strive for a conversational tone, avoiding jargon and keeping polysyllables in check. Use active voice wherever possible.
• Maintain a narrow, deep focus rather than a broad one. We believe that teaching and learning issues are fine-grained ones that too often get superficial treatment. The articles we seek do justice to the nuances of common teaching and learning challenges.
• When addressing teaching strategies and techniques, think why to, not simply how to. Articles should offer evidence for the learning impact (or lack thereof) of particular teaching strategies, such as from peer-reviewed teaching and learning scholarship. That said . . .
• . . . please reference only key sources (ideally no more than five) that interested readers might want to consult. The Teaching Professor isn’t the place for comprehensive literature reviews.
• When sharing strategies that have worked for you, don’t merely recount what you’ve done in your classes. Instead, show readers how they might go about implementing those strategies. A worthy submission says less about “what I did” than about “what you can do.”

While The Teaching Professor doesn’t have strict formatting guidelines, we ask that you use author-date citations and references for any sources—preferably following APA 7 or The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). If your article includes figures, please provide alt text for these.

Once you’ve written your article, please upload it as a Word doc (not a PDF) through our submission portal below. We do not review submissions under consideration elsewhere. The review process usually takes six to eight weeks.

If you have questions about submissions or submission status, please write to The Teaching Professor’s managing editor, Jon Crylen (jon.crylen@magnapubs.com).