Long before my highlighter dried up about halfway through this book, I understood that I should have read it in library school. In fact, syllabi could be built around this book. In Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning, Booth teaches the processes and practices that I learned by trial and error during my first few years as an instruction librarian. Each chapter brims with well-articulated, theoretically-supported ideas that serve to strengthen Booth's main thesis. She insists that librarians need to learn instructional literacy—a combination of reflective practice, educational theory, teaching technologies, and instructional design—in order to be successful classroom teachers.

Part 1 coaches librarians who have never taught before, introduces learning theory, and covers teaching technologies and instructional design. Booth gives excellent advice on writing a teaching philosophy with superb examples, applying the “What's In It For Me” principle, avoiding “The Curse of Knowledge,” creating communities of practice, teaching with emotion, and much more. Although Booth's ideas will be somewhat familiar to some of the non-rookies out there, her argument for instructional literacy grows more convincing with every anecdote, piece of advice, and story from the field. The more I read, the more reinvigorated I felt about my own teaching.

In part 2, Booth explicates her USER approach (Understand, Structure, Engage, Reflect), an adaptable strategy for planning instruction. Following an introductory chapter on the overall approach, she provides separate, detailed chapters on each part of USER. The Structure chapter, for example, is further broken down into sections on creating targets, involving participants, and extending interactions. Booth goes into great theoretical detail, but she makes these chapters even better by doing something remarkable that most textbook authors neglect: She connects theory to practice with concrete examples. To wit, she doesn't just say that instructors should blend activities requiring lower-order and higher-order thinking. She provides two separate examples of how a librarian might achieve that blend in an exercise on identifying scholarly articles. This extra step sets the book apart from its peers.

Each chapter opens with goals and ends with a bulleted summary, reflection points, and notes that point to further reading. If you read one book on instruction librarianship this year, this should be the one.