Editor’s note: This column revisits and responds to a 2009 article for The Teaching Professor in which Graham Broad reflects on his first five years of teaching. We’ve republished Dr. Broad’s article here.
Graham Broad’s piece reminded me of a short critique John Kenneth Galbraith did of his teaching: “How I Could Have Done Much Better.” The honesty of both is courageous and refreshing. Most of us were trained as content experts. We learned to teach by doing it, and not all of us are quick learners. Here’s a list of what I wish I’d learned earlier in my career not to do.
Assume I could teach without knowing anything about it and never having done it
I got my first teaching job in early August and was in the classroom three weeks later, with a text I’d selected and a syllabus I’d constructed. I figured I was ready. Having taken courses in my field for years, I was confident about the content and knew I could explain it clearly. When students (quite a lot of them) didn’t understand my explanations, I concluded that was their problem.
In the
beginning, I never thought there was much to teaching. That realization came to
me as failures in my classrooms started adding up. I liked being friendly with
students—a laid-back, fun-loving, and likeable teacher. That worked until it
became clear that students weren’t taking me or the course very seriously. I
made tests that were poorly constructed, were way too hard, and focused on
trivial details. I got angry and said things in class I shouldn’t have. The
litany of mistakes continued beyond my first year. Unlike Graham, I taught for
a decade before I discovered pedagogical literature and started thinking about
teaching as something I should study. But as with Graham, learning about
teaching saved the day for me. Even though I was less of a teacher for many
students than I should have been, and even though teaching turned out to be more
complex than I anticipated, I did finally learn how to do it better.
Lecture too often—and for way too long
For the first half of my career, I mostly approached teaching as telling. I got pretty good at lecturing and thoroughly enjoyed the performative aspects of teaching. I liked to make students laugh, be dramatic, tell stories, and regale them with fun facts about my content. Some days students would follow me back to the office and we’d talk. Well, I’d talk. I was better at answering questions than asking them.
I’m not against
lecture. For the last half of my career I have despaired at how we’ve pitted
lecture against active learning. It’s not about one or the other but how they
ought to work together. That said, I (and many other teachers) still talk too
much. Students do learn from what we tell them, but they learn more from what
they discover on their own. That’s easy to see when you’re teaching concrete
skills—a student can’t learn to start an IV without practice. It’s just as true
when the goal is learning to think critically. Trying to do something on your
own moves learning to a different level. Then there’s the motivation issue. My
friend Larry nailed me on that score that when he asked, “Which questions are
students more motivated to answer: the ones you ask them or the ones they ask
themselves?”
Assume
learning is the automatic, inevitable outcome of good teaching
It’s not an
entirely bogus assumption. The components of effective instruction (repeatedly identified
by research) are linked to learning outcomes. Students learn more when the
teacher is well-organized, clear, and energized; knows the content; and
understands learning. But I was so enamored with performing in front of
students, I failed to see that teaching is without purpose or integrity if it
does not result in learning. Of course, the teaching matters, but the keystone
on which educational endeavors hang is learning. When learning moves to the
center, it adds a certain authenticity to your teaching. All those stories I used
to tell kept students listening, and they remembered the stories. Unfortunately,
they couldn’t recall the points.
Nothing in my
career changed my teaching more than this paradigm shift from teaching to
learning. I started looking at everything I was doing—policies, practices,
behaviors, activities in class, assignments—and asked, What were they doing for
student learning? At first, I relied on my opinions: Oh, that’s working well. But I realized that evidence matters more
than opinions. So I asked students, and I looked at their work, their
motivation to work, their ability to correct their work, and their exam scores;
I discovered there was a lot I could do to improve their learning.
Make
judgments about students
For too long I made
judgments about students’ abilities. With experience you get pretty good at
predicting who is and isn’t going to do well in the course and indeed in
college. But graduation proved me wrong any number of times, and then there
were those serendipitous run-ins with students who reported successes I wouldn’t
have predicted. I also got some letters—the most memorable one from a law
office. Oh dear, he’s in trouble, I
thought to myself. No, he worked for the firm, had gotten his law degree and
wanted to offer me free legal services should I need them. My chin was on my
chest!
Making
judgments about students is wrong for three reasons. First, it’s hard to be correct
all the time. Second, despite our efforts at objectivity, conclusions about
what students can and can’t do bias our perspective. I graded several sets of
papers without names and was shocked by the results. Third, and most
importantly, students, especially those not doing well, need teachers who
believe in their ability to learn and overcome their learning deficiencies. It’s
not about being less than honest with students. The focus should be what
success requires, not whether they can do it. The teacher can provide good
guidance about where students’ efforts should start.
It’s impossible not to form impressions of
students. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to learn that I needed to put those
aside. Every student deserves teacher confidence in their ability to learn—to
do what they need to succeed in their courses and in college. For many students
the to-do list is long. Some will fail to get it done. But every student should
have a teacher committed to their success.
I enjoyed reading this piece and found it deeply self-reflective. As a new professor, I too, see myself in some of what you wrote and hope to make positive changes in my own teaching style and procedures. The ability for me to connect the lecture learning concepts to the experimental learning for students is a focus as students do not seem to do this for themselves.