Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom

No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well prepared professors are—or how motivated and engaged their students might be—things sometimes go wrong. In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus—and keeping the course of teaching and learning on track. Clear-eyed about the rarely acknowledged foul-ups that teachers invariably confront, Snafu Edu provides evidence-based insights into why these things happen and practical, workable strategies for recognizing, responding to, repairing, and reducing them.

Snafu Edu identifies five major reasons for systemic and individual snafus in the field—inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear—and shows how understanding underlying causes can help educators perceive the problem and take appropriate measures. These measures are part of a problem-solving approach that Neuhaus calls STIR: stop, think, identify, and repair. She details course design principles and pedagogical practices to reduce major teaching and learning snafus by increasing equity, building connections, fostering trust, enabling success, and increasing agency for both educators and students.

Looking beyond “classroom management” and “conflict resolution,” Snafu Edu carefully and clearly grounds its lessons in the real context of education, where institutional structures, systemic injustices, individual and collective history, and the complexity of human interactions mean there will always be snafus. Like a preparedness kit for natural disasters, the book gives teachers an educational “go-bag” of insights, strategies, and practices to have at the ready when things go sideways.