I mentioned in the previous post that, before I started teaching for the first time, I asked some colleagues for advice about how to establish myself as an authority in the classroom. At that point, before I’d ever walked into a classroom as an instructor, I phrased the problem in terms of “controlling” the room. What I’ve figured out since then is that you don’t necessarily want to -control- the classroom, not in a strict sense. You want to -manage- the classroom.
That first semester as a teaching assistant was a shock to the system. I went in expecting… okay, I’ll admit, it was something like seven years ago, and I don’t exactly remember what I was expecting. My job was to lead discussion sections that ran in parallel to the lectures. The students would sit in lecture three times a week, learning about the history of science, and then come to my section, where I would lead a discussion that would illuminate the broader themes of the course, or something. I had a plan that involved connecting the course material to larger issues of science and society, I remember that. In my own research, I was already working up some big-picture arguments about the ways that institutions and infrastructures affect the production of scientific knowledge, and I was expecting to be able to get the students on board with my insightful social critiques, or something.
The reality was something very different. The course was taught that year by a visiting lecturer, someone on a one-year appointment (much like myself, this year) who knew a lot about the history of science but had never taught a survey course like this one. And while he mostly did a good job, he made one critical mistake: he assigned too much reading. Really, really, too much reading. Part of the problem was sheer page count, but part of the problem was that the material was too advanced for the students. This was supposed to be an introductory course, aimed mostly at first- and second-year students, and assuming no prior college-level history courses. The readings that he assigned would have been a little bit of a challenge even in graduate-level courses.
The students were lost, absolutely lost, when it came to the readings. Looking back on this, now that I have the benefit of more teaching experience, I can see that I should have intervened somehow. I should have told the professor that the students couldn’t keep up with the readings, and given him the chance to adjust the reading assignments, or something. (Looking back on this now, I can see it from his point of view, and as an instructor I know that I would absolutely want to know about a problem like this, and to have a chance to fix it.) At the time, though, I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t feel comfortable bringing this up with the instructor. Instead, I did the only thing I felt I could do–I put aside any agenda I’d had about big-idea discussions and social critiques, and concentrated on spending all of our section time going over the reading. We took the reading bit by bit, page by page when necessary. They talked about what they thought might be going on, I gave them some of the historiographical and theoretical context, we worked together to parse through some of the more abstract intellectual arguments, and I did the best I could to connect the reading back to what we were doing in lecture.
I learned a few things that semester. The most obvious thing I learned was the importance of calibrating reading assignments for your audience, I guess, but the most important thing I learned was this: it’s not about me.
One of the things that’s happened to me in the last few years, professionally, is that I’ve started caring a lot about teaching, and about teaching effectively. In some ways I’ve been very fortunate, because I’ve had good advisors, and I was able to work as a teaching assistant and course assistant with a couple of professors who were also excellent lecturers. In other ways, I’ve had to figure out a lot of really basic things on my own, because my department never gave me any formal instruction or guidance on teaching. The single most important piece of teaching philosophy that I’ve managed to piece together for myself, though, is that I should always be asking what the point is, for the student. What’s the larger pedagogical purpose? Why is it important to teach this particular thing, in this particular way? All of my historical stories, all of the intellectual structures and factual narratives and whatnot, should somehow fulfill a teaching function. It should be about the students, in other words, not about me.
I’ve gotten a little far afield from where I meant to go with this post–this may be another part of the reason I don’t blog very often, because I know that I have this tendency to pontificate, and I hate when people get all soapboxy like this. I started on the question of authority and control of the classroom. The model where the teacher has a very rigid control over the classroom is one that pictures the students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. If you think instead about managing the classroom, you’re thinking of the students as active participants. That doesn’t have to mean speaking participants–it’s obviously not feasible for every class to be a discussion-based class. And it’s not easy to think of your students as active participants in the process when they’ve been trained into passivity through years of passive educational models, which is unfortunately where most of us find ourselves.
I worry that I’ve come to the end of this post and the only point of it has been to say that I’ve learned that all of this teaching-philosophy talk about “active learning” and “classroom modelling” is more than just empty phrasemaking. Maybe. If this all sounds obvious and cliche, maybe that’s a good thing–this should be basic, but it’s a whole tangled set of issues that I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years thinking about. I have one more post in this set, I think, and maybe the bigger picture will come together then.
Posted Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 10:32 pm. Filed under: academic.
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A hundred times, yes. I’m all about managing, rather than controlling, the classroom. Especially now, when I’m teaching 15-year-old boys all hopped up on hormones and sugar.
Plus, the sentiment that students are empty vessels waiting to be filled is insultingly condescending towards the students. Some of my best classes have been the ones where the kids taught me something or provided an interpretation I hadn’t thought of before.