You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
A big thank-you to all of the wise and worldly readers who answered the call for useful feedback they’ve received from teaching observations. Some highlights below.
--
Put a penny in your pocket to fidget with when students sit in silence after you ask a question. (I usually don't have a penny -- or pockets, thanks to women's clothing! -- but the general idea stands and flashes into my head whenever I enter one of those uncomfortable silences …)
--
If you are going to call on a specific student for a question, put the name at the end of the question. That way, all students in the room have to pay attention to the question.
--
This really wasn’t a piece of advice as much as it was a self-realization. When I began graduate school at [university], I had to take a seminar on how to teach. I learned two useful pieces of information. The first was how to not squeak chalk on a chalkboard (this was about 30 years ago). The second came near the end of the semester. Each graduate assistant in the course was videotaped while conducting a class. I had a friend in the class with whom I had graduated from my undergraduate institution. The class instructor asked the two of us if we would mind coming together to view our videotapes and discuss. When we viewed the videotapes, we realized that my friend and I had almost exactly the same mannerisms, same style and even the same speech cadence while teaching. Furthermore, we recognized the source of the similarity -- we were unconsciously copying the professor with whom we had taken many of our undergraduate courses in our major.
--
My very first day in a classroom as an instructor -- freshman English at military academy, 1980s -- I'd prepared a bunch of 5x7 cards with what I thought I was going to do the first week. I went through those in 20 minutes and wondered how I'd fill the rest of the hour. I asked the cadets what they wanted to learn -- and that's what started me slowly on using ungraded group tasks for most of my classes. Here I am about to retire, and I still talk more than I should -- this virtual format sort of drives us in that direction, alas, since bandwidth and connectivity sometimes doesn't hold up in group breakout sessions. I've relied more on the wiki tool in Blackboard to get participation.
--
The most useful feedback I ever received was from the director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at the University of [name], my first academic library job. I had been trying to save my students from making common mistakes by warning them ahead of time, and he gently suggested that I "tell the student what you want them to do, not what you don't want them to do." It simplified my classes and switched the tone from negative to positive, which helped me immensely.
--
The most useful feedback I ever received was in my early days as a community college instructor. My dean observed me two semesters in a row teaching the same unit. I was trying to teach writing students how to analyze something -- how to break it into its components and see how they worked together. My dean thought I was trying to teach the content of whatever we were discussing -- something tied to diversity, but I can't recall what -- and didn't think I was doing a very good job of it.
So I changed the content of the analysis to be more visual and even more accessible -- children's picture books. Everyone's been a child, obviously, and many of my students had young children in their lives. Analyzing the images of a picture book opened up something familiar in a safe way and let me finally figure out how to teach the skill of analysis in a way that was fun and made sense.
--
I remember that he told me I was calling on students, listening to what they had to say, and then just kind of saying, “OK,” and moving on. His advice was to respond in a specific way to each individual classroom contribution so that the student feels like their ideas are being integrated into the discussion. He also told me that this response doesn’t always have to be a brilliant analysis or synthesis of what the student said. In some cases it can be useful to rephrase or highlight what they are saying and then offer it to the class as another possibility to debate. This also allows students to interact with one another’s ideas rather than just with the professor (a thing that is often difficult to get them to do).
--
In a workshop on teaching online, one of the instructors gently reminded me that it was not quantity of content but quality of content that mattered. What do students really need to learn from this course? Then I can focus on how to help them learn it.
--
TAing lab at Snootyish U: Your job isn't to make sure they *do* everything perfectly, your job is to make sure they understand the material. Let them make mistakes if it helps them learn.
--
Thanks to everyone who responded! The generosity of spirit in responding at all, let alone responding with embarrassing moments, is heartening.
Reading them in sequence, a common theme emerges: it’s about the students, not about the teacher. Sometimes that means changing plans on the spot, midclass, because something just isn’t working. I’ve been there, too. And I had to smile at the coloring book example. I did much the same thing when I taught a debate class. In order to get the students to focus on technique, rather than content, I’d start with something like “Resolved: Crunchy peanut butter is better than creamy.” Nonthreatening, low-stakes content made it easier to separate the dancer from the dance.
Sometimes self-awareness involves knowing when to take a back seat.
Thanks, everyone!
