“Focus on what you can control” is hardly groundbreaking advice. Yet when I read David Gooblar’s version of it this August in One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable (Harvard UP, 2025), it felt newly persuasive: “[Professors] cannot control most of the myriad factors that influence how much and how well students can work on the course’s tasks,” he writes. “But they can control, to a great extent, what happens in class” (145).
