Fall '07: 2nd "Tips for Teachers" meeting

After having read “Pedagogy” in the Teaching and Learning Support section of the University of Queensland’s Teaching and Educational Development Institute (TEDI), which is found at http://www.tedi.uq.edu.au/teaching/toolbox/pedagogy.html, we began our discussion with the question of student responsibility. One instructor who teaches 100 felt that students were often scared to discuss topics, and a 201 instructor commented that students feel fine when the class is working together, but they become scared when they have to start their individual research topics.

This then turned into a discussion as to the optimal way to encourage students to take responsibility for their work. One teacher said that she models what she would be doing if she were conducting research, as she is specifically trying to model the thought processes behind the research. Then the discussion turned to how we would like students to find a frame and counter frame, or, put differently, how they should try to discover different perspectives so as to add more depth and complexity to their work. One person present said this was akin to a thesis and an antithesis, and another said it was like a thesis and hypothesis, with the effort being to try to prove or disprove that hypothesis based on the evidence uncovered.

When discussing uncovering or citing textual evidence, we referred to the article which warned against preconceived ideas. One teacher commented that once evidence was starting to be gathered in a 201 class, it might be necessary for the student to go back and revise his or her proposal. And another teacher talked about what she drew in the air as a “diamond of knowledge”, which, starting from the base, is the accumulation and expansion of information, and then a shift back inwards to the peak of the diamond, as the knowledge is synthesized and organized to reach its point or conclusion.

Many students, we thought, are however, afraid of challenge, and prefer to remain in the safe or comfortable zone. It was also suggested that some students take the path of least resistance, and they ‘minimax’, meaning that they want maximum returns for minimum effort. The question then arose as to whether it would be beneficial to make students nervous, and it was thought that there is a fine balance between challenge and comfort.

It was also suggested that perhaps it would be an idea to let students do some free writing without being graded, and that they should then search for “seeds” in what they have written, and try to elaborate upon these. In general, it is thought wise to set students a reachable bar, which involves just the right amount, however defined, of stretching.

The idea was raised that it can be fascinating to ask students to write a self-assessment on how they did on their essay. This is good as it involves metacognition, but it also yielded the interesting result that those students who confessed to the assignment being very hard and challenging were actually those who did better than those who did not comment on it being particularly hard, and therefore possibly, by implication, did not stretch themselves that much.

We also asked whether we as teachers should change if students do not like something we do in class. However, it was thought that a more valid reason for change might be to try to be sensitive to the variety of learning styles amongst the students in our class, or to change because to a certain extent teaching involves thinking on our feet, and we might need to adjust our plan based on what is happening that moment in the class. We also talked about the benefit of the Mid-Semester Reflection, as a way to hear from our students about how the class is going, because, as one instructor said, if we teach a class multiple times, we might relax into it, and get into a habit of doing certain things, rather than being sensitive to the particular needs of that class.

We agreed that education should be fun, not as a diversion, but as a component of engagement. Of course this leads to the question as to whether we, as teachers, are meant to entertain. And one teacher said she had a very grumpy looking student with whom she felt she had to be careful not to dislike, but then he surprised her at the end of the semester by telling her that he had learned to write thanks to her. And another teacher concluded the meeting by saying that he had heard that in an angry, seemingly troubled class, a teacher received high evaluations as the class was very engaged, and in a happy, flippant class taught by the same teacher, her evaluations were lower as the class was less engaged.