There’s got to be a better way to prepare for class

You must have some sort of class website, where the students can submit comments, no? Make it mandatory for them to respond to a prompt you set about the reading, and read some of these responses (if there are fewer than 30 you can read most of them, if more just read a selection, including the strongest students, the weakest students, and a random smattering of others). Reading the weakest comments tells you what your own lecture should focus on; reading the strongest tells you who you need to be getting to answer certain kinds of questions and helps you in setting problems for them to discuss. Simply making the task mandatory results (in my experience) in the room being significantly better prepared (this is true even in large lectures, though goodness knows why).

Alternatively, as someone once proposed to me here at CT (a snarky comment that haunted me for years and ultimately changed substantially the way I teach) make them prepare the lectures; its their learning that matters, not yours, and preparing the lecture leads to much more learning than listening (or in most cases, half-listening at best) to it does.

I’m preparing by loitering on the internet. 17 minutes to the first seminar of the day.

I am seeking a better (more time efficient) way to handle the grading. That’s my Waterloo. As a lecturer, I’ve got 80 students in paper-intensive courses, so have no idea what the answer is.

This is very old school, but has helped me. I take a lot of brief notes on note cards. You may, for example, want to refer back to what other critics have said about a book, or link themes see across several books you assign. The note cards allow you to do this, and to collect a rich body of work to reference. I still review my readings, but I have more ways I can take the information.

Well, my link didn’t go in. Let’s try just putting it here:

I’ve been doing something like Sandwichman this year, with the proviso that they are supposed to meet up before class in their sub-groups to discuss the pre-circulated questions (3). So far, that hasn’t really happened though, so they go into little huddles at the start. The general discussion has been better than usual though.

I’m skeptical of claims that anything in teaching is a ‘knack, personality based’. Teaching is a completely unnatural activity, involving complex skills, that need to be observed, mimicked, worked at, refined… practiced! The “natural teacher” myth only gets hold in an environment in which we don’t take teaching seriously as a profession. (In my experience k-12 teachers get barely more education in these skills than higher ed teachers, who get none at all). Successfully moderating a discussion; knowing how to silence a loudmouth — these are skills, that need to be practiced over and over again.

I have found that the requirement to post about the readings (referred to above in my first comment) has transformed the level of preparation and readiness of the students. I don’t understand why they do it because it is pretty apparent that although I read what they write I don’t penalize anyone for not doing it.

As a student I disliked small groups because it just seemed like we were either pooling our ignorance, or being held captive by the loudmouths. There was no moderation by the profs in these small groups, it seemed like a lazy way out for them. But I was shy about talking in large groups, so if small groups could have worked the way Harry’s sound like they do, it would have been a good thing.

When I was a graduate student TA, I liked the small group discussions, which I took part in, but I don’t know whether my students did.

Class size is so much bigger on average now than it was in my student days, this must present problems for conscientious profs.

Perhaps a small thing, but I’d suggest ditching those word files and experimenting with Microsoft OneNote. It is perhaps the best thing MS has ever done and it’s perfect for the sort of work you describe. I’m a die-hard Linux guy, but I keep a laptop that runs Windows solely because of OneNote.

I took a class with our resident MacArthur Genius and can only suggest that you not do what he did. After sitting down at the table, he removed his watch and adjusted it upon its band so that its face would be always within a quick glimpse. Nothing says Committed Teacher like immediately prepping for departure.

After sitting down at the table, he removed his watch and adjusted it upon its band so that its face would be always within a quick glimpse. Nothing says Committed Teacher like immediately prepping for departure.

I rather strongly disagree. Students have other classes, not to mention jobs, child care responsibilities, etc. Except in extraordinary circumstances, your classes should begin and end on schedule, and you very definitely should have one eye on the clock as your class time comes to an end. The teacher whose students are routinely 15 minutes late for their next class (I had one of those, a celebrated scholar and a disastrous teacher) is seriously dysfunctional.

My teaching experience is EFL and Further Education. I would say you need to have a clear idea of what you want the students to learn, reading the text then picking out the teaching points seems the wrong way round to me. Obviously as you engage with a text some stuff will occur to you but my starting point would be my learning aims. Then you have to think about what you want the students to get from each part of the lecture. Having them do either tasks or discuss questions can work but as a student I’d want to feel that I knew why I was being asked to do it and could see how it would fit in with the subject of the lecture. Just being asked to discuss a topic without any context or if the points raised then don’t seem especially relevant to the rest of the lecture would make me think it was laziness on the lecturer’s part. Generally if it was a straightforward task I’d be happy to do it at the time or if it was more complex I’d prefer to prepare it for the following session. To me group discussions would work better in seminars than lectures but that just be the UK system.

Gosh, this makes me happy to be a mathematician. Anyhow, I wanted to second harry b’s comments
“I’m skeptical of claims that anything in teaching is a ‘knack, personality based’. Teaching is a completely unnatural activity, involving complex skills, that need to be observed, mimicked, worked at, refined, practiced! … Successfully moderating a discussion; knowing how to silence a loudmouth — these are skills, that need to be practiced over and over again,”
and also add that of course these skills can be taught, as well. It’s always helpful to get a few tips from a friendly, experienced colleague.

Also disagree with the original comment about the watch. I try not to check it TOO often, but if you don’t know where you are in the period, I don’t see how you can pace the rest.

Like Matt, as a student I hated [small breakout groups] primarily because I disliked the way it gave loud, talkative, stupid people more of discussion time and tended to make the professor, whose input was the most helpful for understanding the material chip in less often at less length.

A big part of why I dropped out of college the first time (in the 70s) was this general phenomenon – maybe it was a trend in those days – of the teacher being very very coy about saying anything, ever. This was at a (purportedly) Very Good Small Liberal Arts College, and I remember lots of class time sitting around in silence waiting for a student to speak up, or long monologues by stupid big mouths, and the prof. just sitting there pursing his lips. I don’t know why harry b thinks that being able to concentrate on a lecture the whole time is an unusual ability. Is it really? I never had a hard time if the lecturer was the least bit good.

sorry, in the second paragraph should say something like, ‘how will you know and how will the students know that they have mastered that one big thing and connected it to the other big things they are supposed to learn in the other books?’

Corey’s description is, yes, very clear that the lecture and discussion are interwoven. But — there’s a hell of a lot of lecturing on lots of campuses. Talk to students — or just go and listen in on classrooms with open doors — and you’ll see a lot of it. So no, I don’t think the lecture is a straw man at all.

I didn’t mean it to be condescending. I was responding directly to the people who said they hated group discussions as students, because I conjectured it was badly done (something jonnybutter’s comment also suggests) and I conjecture further that it was badly done because the teachers didn’t see instruction as a complex skill that it is important to practice and refine. That second conjecture isn’t unreasonable if they attended an institution like mine which has very limited professional development around instruction.

I do think we might seek a different language to discuss things. “Lecture” is multiply ambiguous!

“People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures:– You might teach the making of shoes by lectures!”
Boswell: Life of Johnson

This is an interesting thread. I am relatively new to teaching and find it such fascinating, challenging, exciting and frustrating work. I am most certainly not an expert on teaching – I learn something new each semester. This thread makes me think about my goals as a teacher – and my ultimate goal is the development of the student’s voice – as a writer and as a speaker. Most of my classes are writing-intensive and also require students to put together a presentation of some kind, because presenting information is an essential skill (and relevant to my students’ career interests.)

Perhaps it is different elsewhere, but I have found that our secondary schools are AWFUL at preparing students for writing, critical thinking and communicating. “No Child Left Behind” has left our students quite far behind in many important areas.

I HATED the lecture format as a student; perhaps most of my teachers were simply unskilled in this method. The classes that stuck with me were the ones that made me think, argue, write and communicate – and yes, participate in group discussions with fellow students. That’s why I have to mix up lectures with other ways of teaching, including small group discussions. I do not want students to be passive recipients of information; I want them to actively participate in their education.

Anon @ 28 “My approach, based on good lecture-inclusive courses I had as student, is to break lecturing down into 10-2o minute chunks: each mini-lecture leads to a main problem and question that we then have open discussion about for the next 10-20 minutes. Even those mini-lectures are not simply lecture; I proceed through the lecture material with questions, so the students are interactive throughout.”

This sounds wonderful. What do you do with the quiet students who don’t speak up? Do you call on people or just pick those who raise their hands?

I earned my PhD in History in 2004. I’ve taught history at my current institution for ten years. (My school is a public RII with no masters students in the history program. We teach undergrad history majors and train high school social science teachers – its the higher ed equivalent of Lake Woebegone).

For my first five years I worked hard at becoming a really great teacher in the same mode and tradition that Corey Robin is working in. I had my Western Civ students reading Rousseau’s Social Contract and other good stuff like that. I had my upper division students reading a monograph or three article every week for seminar. The students soldiered on and got through the material, but it wasn’t fun and discussions were frequently grim and ended with me giving some sort of impromptu lecture. I was pretty sure that whatever they learned, it was gone after a semester. I was a good enough teacher and scholar to earn tenure.

I was basically teaching the way I had been taught and used the strategies that I saw as successful for me as a student. Which would have been fine if I was teaching a 4/4 to classrooms full of my mini-mes every semester. I was probably effective for 1/3 of the students I taught every term, and that is probably being generous. I was a caring teacher, I prepped conscientiously, I did my best to explain the material in the ways that I knew how, and tried to learn new ways.

In the last five years I started to learn how to become a more effective teacher. I began reading pedagogy for history teaching after a colleague turned me onto to the work by Sam Wineburg at Standford. I also read an article by Lendol Calder about restructuring his American History survey. Basically I stumbled across a useful scholarly literature on teaching in higher education. I found models that allowed me to think more deeply about how I was teaching and how my students learned. I’ve been able to make my classes better over time and its changed the kind of preparation I do. Here are some of the resources that worked for me. I would have never found them on my own.

Ambrose, Susan A. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series; Variation: Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010.

Calder & Beaver, Uncoverage: Towards a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2006/calder/index.html

Wineburg, Samuel S. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Critical Perspectives on the Past; Variation: Critical Perspectives on the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

And I bet some of these techniques might apply to people teaching students to analyze texts in Political Theory.

Matt_L
And I bet some of these techniques might apply to people teaching students to analyze texts in Political Theory.

That could well be — I would never suggest that there is only one ‘right’ way to approach teaching anything (in the humanities/soc. sciences, at any rate).

Just a quick defense of my distaste for the Great Man’s watch. I can’t think of a class room I’ve ever been in which didn’t have a clock prominently displayed. Summoning memory, the clocks of grade school and high school were the size of salad plates. Those of college were like over-sized dinner plates. The clock is the daemon of schools. His flourish with the watch may not have been a calculated insult, but he later wrote a thinly veiled story about how dull we were. I was a terrible student so I can’t disagree. Maybe it was the equivalent of an inmate scratching a passing day into the walls of his cell.

I’ve had the privilege of being in the university classroom for over three decades–and in your System, Harry, and I hope the few students I’ve no doubt sent you haven’t been all clunkers–and after all is said and done, lecture-discussion just works best for me. I did PowerPoint, group work, student presentations, yada-yada (and at least for a couple of years in every case) and I have returned to L-D every time. So no clickers for me, thank you. I try to be interesting, fresh, and engaging. I also hate cold-calling, but have found that energetic engagement–with lots of eye contact–still draws out a lot of questions and comments. My style is admittedly a bit histrionic, and isn’t for everyone. But it’s genuinely me, and isn’t mere “acting”–it’s delivery of my interest in them, and in the material, and all of us learning something. And that something is to think clearer and better.

But I long ago discovered there’s only one way for me to do this: internalize what needs to be presented and discussed just as an actor not only memorizes lines, but prepares for improvisational situations. So no notes. I haven’t taken a note to class in a quarter century. I figure that if I don’t the stuff inside and outside, so I can riff on it when need be, then I’m not prepared.

I have one advantage in all this too. I’m a 4/4, and so I got a lot of practice early in my career on the teaching parallel of what Hawkeye Pierce called on MASH “meatball surgery.” I cycle through a 6-class curriculum over and over again, and so I can’t afford to get bored with it because I might lose a mind in critical condition. Each class deserves my best, and every class I try to stand and deliver that.

So Corey–if I may–maybe try just going out there with a 10-point outline stuffed in your head and mentally rehearsed so you know it cold. But be prepared to deviate from it at points given the unexpected magic of the classroom, both from you and them. You’re all in this together and you need each other to make it for real(z).

Ha — almost every classroom I have been in has had a clock prominently displayed, but remarkably many of those clocks are/were stopped or, worse, show the wrong time or, worse still, change very erratically…. Im not kidding.

If he wrote a story about how dull you were subsequently that’s fine, if it was un-felt, self-deprecating, and did not affect his treatment of you. If he meant it, he should have found somewhere else to be a great man. I don’t know what the institution was, but because you say he was a great man, I am guessing it was somewhat selective at least. At such institutions (I’m at a more than somewhat but less than highly selective institution) the whole operation is premised on the presence of tuition-paying and subsidy-attracting undergraduates, and our job is to make them learn. If you find them dull, find a way of finding them interesting, or find a different job.

You’ve convinced me about the watch!

Oh, and for all the problems with NCLB, it is NOT the culprit for our high schools’ failure to prepare students to think critically — that long predates NCLB!

Thanks all for a great thread.

On pre-class discussion boards, two tweaks: ask students not just to post but to respond to at least one other student’s comment, and, where appropriate, ask ’em to supply an example of some key point in the reading. The examples serve two purposes. The best will give you new and interesting material to use in class; the full range will give you a sense of how well folks understand the point they’ve been asked to illustrate. I got this idea from a talented colleague.

Overall the e-discussion produces a much better-prepared classroom, in addition to the benefits already noted of giving you something to think toward to as you prepare the class.

Cold-calling raises a lot of thorny questions and might be worth a thread of its own one day.

Alan White @ 43 “But be prepared to deviate from it at points given the unexpected magic of the classroom, both from you and them.”

THIS is the best part about teaching – that magic that blooms on those (not as frequent as we would like) occasions!

Matt_L – thanks for the reading recommendations.

Anon @48 – I somewhat disagree about allowing the silent ones to remain silent. NOT ALWAYS – it’s a delicate balance – but I was terribly shy in college – and it was a detriment to be allowed to remain silent. I see that the women in my classes – the bright, very wonderful young women – remain too silent and let the “loud ones” take charge. I do what I can to get those silent, shy ones to speak up (men and women.) To me, it’s important to get some of those talented, shy people to learn to speak up. But again, it’s a delicate balance – it is painful to force the painfully silent ones to talk, but you have to let the used-to-remaining silent ones have an opportunity learn to speak up. They sometimes have such incredible insight to share.

You say: “I was a student who never participated in class. I did it because my way of paying attention required focused, sustained concentration, and reflection and reformulation, that was always broken or lost when I joined the conversation.”

I was a quiet student who would have benefitted from being asked to contribute. I teach public speaking now (and a wide range of other courses) and I teach my public speaking class as one who would have fled the class in college – but I know today how very important this skill is (not just speaking, but presenting, organizing information in an engaging way.) I had to take years of improv training in Chicago to get over my fear of public speaking. I want to provide a safe place for the quiet ones to bloom. And when I see them bloom, it makes me very happy.

Teaching in higher ed is really a challenging occupation, for so many reasons…

I haven’t lectured once in 10 years. But I spend more time preparing for class now, than back when I did lecture.