Chris Palmer says he was stung into teaching effectively by the candor of his students.
As he writes in College Teaching at Its Best: Inspiring Students to Be Enthusiastic, Lifelong Learners (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), he came to college teaching late, in 2004 at the age of 56, after more than 25 years in conservation and filmmaking at the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation.
He prepared himself as well as he could, including by asking his three college-going daughters how he should go about it.
Then he asked students for anonymous assessments, and, he says by phone, “they could be blunt and candid and hurtful.” They could also be correct, he concedes: “I decided I would learn and make adjustments.”
Looking back on what would become 14 years of teaching communications at American University before he retired last year, Palmer says that he was “almost panicking” at first. “I worked furiously hard to try to avoid failing.”
He conferred with his new colleagues: How would he not run out of things to say, or deal with aggressive students who let loose with rude, cutting, or racist comments? He had to admit, as he writes in his book, that he had no settled approach to teaching, “other than a vaguely articulated conviction that I wanted my students to do well.”
He also owns up to many errors: embarrassing students, rushing through material, assigning uninspiring “busy work,” allowing verbose students to prattle on.
Then came the feedback that shocked but also helped him the most, he says: An enrollee in one of his classes observed that he wasn’t pushing his students hard enough.
Suddenly, he realized that students wanted him to transform their lives. The question to ask himself was not “What are my students learning?” but “What are my students becoming?”
His enthusiastic response to that realization is still evident in his voice as he says, all these years later: “It’s about what you convey through the tone of your voice, by the look in your eyes, by the movement of your body, by moving around the room with alacrity and conveying your love of your subject and how it is relevant to students’ lives.”
Knowledge of content, alone, cannot make up for poor delivery, he says. “That seems in a way so obvious, but you wouldn’t know it sometimes, from watching teachers. We often sink into dullness.”
So don’t blame students, he says, if your teaching doesn’t help them to “become fuller, more contributing, happier, mission-directed people.” Instead, inspire “complete student engagement.”
How? It sounds straightforward enough, albeit exhausting: Demonstrate commitment by wearing a suit and tie. Greet students by name. Compliment students, particularly quieter ones who may need some teasing out.
Understand that shy students often fear failure, are culturally disinclined to speak up, or are torn between learning on their own and hoping, deep down, that they will be provided with opportunities to express themselves. It is a professor’s responsibility to disrupt hesitation, in the interests of each student’s learning, including mastering the ability to speak in public, he believes.
He has plenty of don’ts, too: Don’t play favorites, joke inappropriately, demean students, or sell them short.
Some of his advice will challenge colleagues who seek to emulate him. For example, he says, let students propose alternative assignments that might engage them more than the ones you set yourself. Or, after asking permission from a student who performed well, call the student’s parents to tell them how well the student did, and convey the parents’ pride back to the student.
A refrain in Palmer’s account is that the nonresearch part of the profession he entered is underemphasized. He advocates that academics supercharge their teaching. In chapters with titles like “Convey Your Passion” and “Harness the Power of Caring,” he guides them toward that goal.
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
