Graduate Teaching Class: Week 1 & 2
Writing my way through teaching a class on teaching
Last week I started teaching my class: College Teaching in Natural Resources, for the fourth time. Last semester I challenged myself to write about some aspect of teaching every week throughout the semester. This semester I am challenging myself to write about this specific class every week.
I’ve already failed! I didn’t write anything last week because things were extra chaotic and I fell behind on … everything. But I’m clawing my way back.
So this week I’m summarizing a few points from the first two weeks (just two meetings) of my College Teaching in Natural Resources class.
The first week: Teaching Philosophies
The first week of class, students wrote a teaching philosophy/teaching statement. We then discussed our teaching philosophies. I think it is very useful to get a sense of where students stand, but this is also useful for the trajectory of class: they will write another teaching statement at the end of the semester and compare it to this initial one.
It is always interesting to see what bubbles to the top in these teaching statements. What do students care about? What do they consider good teaching?
This year, a few threads seemed to emerge. One was inclusivity. Students talked about wanting to support students of differing backgrounds, about respecting students, and about removing barriers to entry in their fields.
Another was teaching skills beyond direct learning objectives. Students discussed wanting to help their students become lifelong learners, to prepare them for careers of the future, to motivate their general curiosity, and to help them develop transferable skills.
Finally, they discussed a few specific teaching strategies: collaboration, learning by doing, open/correctable quizzes, and providing lots of feedback.
The things that were missing in these statements were the things that are always missing: specific examples of how they’d run a classroom, good structure and organization of ideas, and some core teaching strategy material that often resonates when we address it in class. It’ll be really cool to see what these statements look like at the end of the semester!
Week 2: College Science Teaching - Before you meet your students
We read a couple books in class and discuss them. The first one is College Science Teaching by Terry McGlynn. This book fundamentally changed how I think about teaching AND gave me ways to talk about parts of my developing teaching strategies that I didn’t have names for… I’m always excited to share it with students.
The first week we read and discussed Chapter 1: Before you meet your students. It is a wide ranging chapter with sections on broad teaching and classroom strategies, to those about students’ lives and how to design courses to take their realities into consideration, to developing your own teaching philosophy, to how classes differ at different universities. It’s a lot to discuss in 50 minutes. But, it sets the stage and it’s nice that there is no shortage of topics to dig into, so there’s pretty much guaranteed to be good discussion even in the first week or two of class, when we are still getting comfortable.
We jumped around a bit in our discussion, but a few things stood out.
Instructor Identity: We discussed how an instructors identity can influence how they are treated by students… so to create the same classroom environment, different people may need different strategies. There was also some discussion about how instructor identity can seemingly lead to too many students wanting to discuss too many personal things with you too often. We discussed strategies for exiting these conversations (needing to go to a meeting, take a call) and for getting students to reconsider whether some things are appropriate to discuss with their instructor (“are you sure you want to be telling your professor this?”)
What are the results of an adversarial relationship with your students? We also discussed how instructors adopting an adversarial stance with their students, or students doing so with faculty can result in certain behaviors. Students brought up that this can lead to a lack of trust, to faculty creating overly difficult assessments, and inflexible rules that alienate some students. I brought up that I also think it increases cheating, because students are less likely to feel like you are challenging them to help them, and more like you are just trying to make things difficult for no other reason.
What are some biases we need to dispell? This dovetailed well with the adversary relationship discussion, but some additional points were made: Primarily, faculty who still think all their students live on campus and are solely focused on school need to realize that the student body is much more complex than that.
What does it mean to be a coach? This was an interesting discussion. I asked students in the class if they thought McGlynn’s idea of approaching class like a coach was a good one. The students argued that they thought an instructor WAS basically a coach so didn’t understand the distinction. I REALLY HOPE this is because more instructors ARE operating like coaches and that’s why my students in this class saw the parallels! I tried to explain the distinctions I saw: working together towards learning objectives vs. just “keeping score” or throwing up hurdles, challenging students but with them understanding it is to help them improve, and just generally having students feel like you are on their side. I think it would be really awesome if in the future it is really difficult to contrast between how a college instructor operates and how a coach does!
Next week we are discussing developing your syllabi and creating a positive classroom environment. Tune in to hear more!