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Posts tagged ‘teaching’

Jan 15

Reflections on Teaching at the Start of a New Semester

Today is the first day of the new semester.  Last semester I returned to teaching from a year-long sabbatical.  I returned refreshed and tenured (I had already taught with tenure for one semester before my sabbatical as Wabash graciously completes the tenure process in one semester).  The year off was good for my research, as we generally understand sabbaticals to be.  But it was also good for my teaching.  It was good for my teaching as a rest.  Recent research shows that the ability to do well over time depends on rest and recovery.  It is good to give your mind time off from the tasks that consume you.*  I took time off from thinking about teaching to focus on a book project.  Ideas for teaching occurred to me in the midst of that work, but I wasn’t trying to come up with ideas for teaching.  In planning for last semester, I decided to do some creative non-obvious approaches to organizing my courses because I felt a certain freedom from expectations and a willingness to do what I thought would work rather than what was the typical structure of a course.

As I reflect on how things went, I see four things that I did this semester that made for more successful teaching, four things that were made possible in part by having tenure and then having a sabbatical.

  • Slowing down
  • Being authentic
  • Getting clearer about expectations
  • Doing more introduction and transitional set-up

Each of these elements contributed to my goal in teaching to encourage students to engage in the philosophical classroom as thinkers rather than consumers of knowledge. Read more

Jan 8

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The Case for Lecturing More: Sharing Our Insights to Motivate Insight

There appears to be a cottage industry of thinkpieces in defense of the lecture.  Alex Small defends his mixed lecture and discussion approach in the Chronicle of Higher Education several years ago in his piece, In Defense of the Lecture.  He defends the lecture as an opportunity to put on display the way an expert in a field approach problems.  He also describes how he uses discussion to set up and break up the parts of class where he lectures.  Miya Tokumitsu defends the art of collective listening in her piece in Jacobin earlier this year, In Defense of the Lecture.  In 2009, Adam Kotsko wrote A Defense of the Lecture for Inside Higher Ed in which he argues that lecturing can help bring students to the level of good readers so that an engaged discussion might ensue.

In planning for courses in my return from sabbatical, I spent some time thinking about why I have typically refrained from lecturing.  I tend to conduct class in a way that tries to get students to come to insights on their own.  But I found that this approach has a certain inauthenticity insofar as it involves asking questions I already know the answer to.  My thinking has been that students learn better when they reach their conclusion themselves, but I think that supposes that there is a limited number of insights and that I have already had them.  The result is that I hold them back to lead students to have insights. Read more

Jan 4

Using the Syllabus as a Planner through the Review Function in Word

Faculty joke about how often we tell students “It’s in the syllabus!”  But what if the answers that we  faculty wanted for what we are doing in the course were in the syllabus?  The syllabus is a funny document to me because officially it is for students, but I also use it for myself to remember what the class is supposed to be doing in any given class meeting.  The problem is that I don’t want to put all the information that I need for planning on to the same document that students get.  This is not because I want to keep it to myself, but I think an overwritten syllabus can be distracting and confusing.  And sometimes as the course progresses, the planning changes. Read more