No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well-prepared professors are—or how motivated and engaged their students might be—things sometimes go awry in the course of a course.
In Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025), teaching practice expert Jessamyn Neuhaus, Director of Syracuse University’s Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and a professor in the School of Education, offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating classroom challenges.
Offering practical wisdom for any higher education instructor, Neuhaus is clear-eyed about the rarely acknowledged foul-ups that teachers confront. She provides evidence-based insights into why these mistakes happen and workable strategies for recognizing, responding to, repairing, and reducing them.
Specifically, 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 foul-ups.
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 a classroom goes sideways.
Writes Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor and Chair of Education and Director of the Peace, Conflict, and Social Justice Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College, “Through a narrative infused with humor as well as deep seriousness, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers recommendations, not prescriptions, for leaning into the demanding and essential work of striving for equity, connection, trust, productive struggle, and agency.”