I taught my first college class in 1964, at College of the Holy Names, now Holy Names University, in Oakland, Calif. I knew almost nothing about teaching, did a lousy job, and was not rehired for the next semester. My last teaching position was at Indiana University at Bloomington in 2004. After the spring semester, I retired as a professor amid much praise from students, colleagues, and teaching professionals.
Over those four decades, my teaching had clearly improved. What, specifically, had I learned? Here are 10 lessons that I’d like to share in hopes other college instructors might benefit from some or all of them:
Teach according to your personality. I went to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s and came out of that era and ethos believing that instructors should befriend students and dress like them. So I wore jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. But most students were not very friendly, and my classes seemed to move at a slow, sometimes painful pace.
One day at Indiana University in the early 70s, I was assigned to observe the class of a young teaching assistant. He met me at the classroom door dressed in a three-piece suit, tie, and polished dress shoes. I assumed that he could not relate to the students and that I would endure a long and tedious hour.
He asked the students to move the chairs from the discussion circle in which they rested to straight rows from front to back. I considered that a mistake, like his formal attire and stance in front of the class. But as he talked, with very proper diction, his excitement about the material became increasingly apparent. I looked around and saw that students were paying close attention and taking notes. When he paused and requested questions, many hands went up. The students asked good questions, he responded well, and then returned to his lecture. That format continued for about 20 minutes, after which he summarized his talk and told the students to write answers to some questions that he handed out.
As part of my job as observer, I asked the instructor, with about 15 minutes remaining in the period, to leave the room so I could discuss his teaching with the students. As soon as he left, the students spontaneously began to praise him. I was skeptical: “Wasn’t he too formal? Do you really relate to someone like that in a three-piece suit?” But indeed they did -- even though most of the men wore torn T-shirts and the women had on tie-dyed outfits. They truly liked and respected his enthusiasm for the material.
That experience overturned many of my prejudices about teaching. I decided to teach more in line with my personality. Although I wasn’t a suit-and-tie person, I wasn’t as laid back as my appearance implied. I felt most comfortable in front of a class in pressed slacks, collared shirts, and loafers. I also tried to teach material that I cared about deeply rather than literary works that the English department recommended. (Fortunately, my boss encouraged my excursions.)
My classes became livelier, and my student evaluations improved greatly. I had learned a crucial lesson: Most students possess superb radar that quickly locates phoniness in professors. Thus, every teacher has to figure out who she or he is, how best to appear before a class, and what material to teach. And in long teaching careers, every instructor should have three-to five-year checkups and revise their dress, approach, and material as their personal values and circumstances change. Teaching is a highly individual endeavor, and each instructor should work according to what personally feels most comfortable.
Hand out complete syllabi and course instructions the first day. From my Berkeley background in the 60s, I also did not believe in elaborate syllabi and course instructions. Instead, during the first classes in a course, the students and I would agree on what we would do and how we would do it. Yet I came to see that such an approach resulted in much confusion among students and wasted time for me answering logistical questions like, “What’s the policy on late papers?” I realized that the ideal was interfering with learning.
Over the years, my initial handouts increased in size but also provided a reference guide to all aspects of the course. During my last decade of teaching, I noticed that many students wrote on course evaluations comments like, “I always knew what was going on and what I had to do.” I took that as a compliment -- and a reinforcement that I’d been right to abandon my original approach.
Vary your teaching methods. Nothing bores students -- and teachers -- as quickly as relentless lecturing. A close second is relentless, yet aimless, class discussions. After much trial and error in my early years of teaching (my errors and the students’ trials), I concluded that mini-lectures coupled with focused discussions worked best for me.
In the process, however, I found that one of my key challenges was encouraging class participation. Calling upon people with their hands raised usually produced comments from the same five or six highly verbal or chatterbox students and frequent hostility from the taciturn majority. But randomly calling on students did not work well either; some students felt that I was “picking on” them.
I decided one day to have every student bring a question on the reading assignment to the next class, but that produced many questions scribbled quickly, and without much thought, immediately before the class began. I then modified the format and asked students to write single-paragraph answers to their questions. That approach produced much better questions as well as coherent answers.
I then tweaked the format and asked students to make two copies of their questions and answers and to hand in one before class. I then ordered what they’d given me according to topics and used that order to guide classroom interactions. I asked each student not to give her or his answer until the class had discussed the question. On occasion, I also assembled students in groups of five or six to ask other members of the group their questions, or to make up new questions and answers and then ask the class.
The surprise element of the “Q-and-A papers” was that some students, particularly shy or reticent ones, participated in class discussion despite their inclination not to, and they seemed to enjoy the experience. I recall one young woman telling me at the end of a course, “I’m graduating this semester and I talked more in this class than all my other classes at Indiana combined. Thank you.”
Let students choose their grades. I’ve always had this policy and, in recent years, I articulated it on the course handout with:
“You are paying a great deal of money to attend this university and your grades play a significant role in your future. As the instructor of this course, I see my role as a messenger: When students do all of their assignments carefully and extremely well, I deliver an ‘A’ on their assignments, and if they sustain their exceptional work throughout the course, I mark an ‘A’ on the grade sheet at the end of the semester. When they choose to do less than outstanding work, or do mediocre or no work, I deliver the appropriate grade. Obviously, with this grading philosophy, I do not numerically curve the grades on tests, papers, or at the end of the course. It is possible for every student who sustains exceptional work in this course to earn an ‘A’ grade. I have had classes where quite a number of students made that choice. I have also had classes where many students selected much lower grades.”
I then stated in detail, and with examples, my specific criteria for each letter grade.
Over the years, students seemed happy with that policy. Although the average grades in my classes were lower than those of most of my colleagues, I rarely received complaints from students.
Don’t take attendance. I’ve always assumed that universities are not high schools and that college students are adults, attending class as their choice. In my course handout, I wrote:
“If you choose to use the time of the class meeting to do something else, that is your decision. ... You are responsible, however, for understanding the material done in class during your absence, and I will grade your work in the course under the assumption that you have mastered that material. However, if you miss class because of illness, I will help you make up the work.”
An equally important reason for my policy was that otherwise I’d have to deal with many students who, having no desire to be in the room, would shuffle papers, pop gum, snore loudly, and engage in other distracting behaviors. They changed the ambiance of the classroom, and I decided that I much preferred to teach a smaller number of volunteers than a large army of conscripts.
In addition, not requiring attendance allowed students to vote with their feet on my teaching. If attendance dwindled, I realized that I needed to rethink the section of the course where students did not come -- or, on several occasions, the whole course. But if they showed up in large numbers, I knew that I was doing a good job.
Take a hard line on late and incomplete work. I always believed that turning in late work or receiving an “Incomplete” grade are special privileges that should be reserved for extraordinary occasions -- when students had serious physical or mental problems. I also required any student in that situation to have a signed letter from his or her doctor, stipulating the nature of the student’s illness and when the physician thought the student would be well enough to finish the work.
I took a letter grade off for late work -- including missed quizzes, exams, and Q-and-A assignments -- without a medical excuse. I know the policy seemed punitive to some students, but I had to be fair to other class members who turned in their work when it was due.
Ironically, the people who complained most about the policy were not my students, but a number of my colleagues. They said that some of their students were asking them for “extensions” and even “Incompletes” in courses so that they could get their work for me in on time. I suggested to my colleagues that they switch to my policy.
Give students lots of options for major assignments and exams. During my early years of teaching, I realized that the best student work came out of a student’s real interests. If I assigned a narrow essay on a specific topic, a few class members wrote it exceptionally well, others earned good grades on it, but many students did indifferent or poor work. If, instead, I encouraged students to identify their own topics connected to the course and to pursue them with my help, many more students wrote good papers. My assignments remained analytic approaches to the subject matter, however, and one group of students still underachieved on papers and exams -- even though they had demonstrated in class and office discussions that they thoroughly understood the material.
At the time, in the 1970s, the research on left-brain and right-brain dominance became public knowledge. I decided to allow students to substitute some creative papers and take-home exams for analytic ones. For example, when we read John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. in a course, students could write a creative paper -- equal in length and difficulty to the analytic ones -- using one of Dos Passos’ techniques, like a biographical portrait of an historical figure in the style of Dos Passos, or a “Camera Eye” personal commentary on an American scene of the period. Or students could suggest another type of creative paper or take-home exam connected to the material. While only about a fifth of the students took the creative option, most of the results were excellent and continued to be so in subsequent years. Moreover, I could reward the right-brain-dominant students with the grades that they deserved.
Require clear and coherent written work. As a reader and a professional writer, I respect the English language, so I always insisted that students avoid sloppy prose, jargon, and careless presentation. In 40 years, I must have crossed out over 40,000 cumbersome passive constructions. That always required a fair amount of line editing of student papers and marking low grades on many of them. But it paid off: It caught students’ attention and often their writing improved quickly.
Combat plagiarism. Long ago I realized that the best way to combat plagiarism was to require some in-class writing from every student, and then to line edit it to become familiar with the writing style. In the course handout, I explained why I wanted their in-class writing samples:
“An experienced English teacher can easily tell the difference between original student writing and plagiarized work. Because you will have to write various exercises in class, I will have an excellent idea of your true writing abilities. Thus, when you turn in longer pieces of writing -- although more careful and polished than your in-class work -- they will still reflect your abilities. Your writing is like your signature, unique to you. To turn in someone else’s writing -- published critic, friend, tutor, doofus on the Web -- is foolish, easily recognized, an insult to your instructor and fellow students, and a good way to get yourself into serious trouble.”
Even more effective than my warning was requiring students to turn in their notes, outlines, and drafts with their final projects and take-home exams. I suppose that a student could have bought a polished paper from an agency on the Web, but then the student would have to deconstruct it into draft, outline, and note form. Doing the deconstruction would probably teach the student so much about writing and the topic that it would negate the plagiarism.
Fortunately, that scenario never occurred in my classes. In fact, to my knowledge, I never had a case of plagiarism.
Get out of the way. The best teaching occurs when students take something that the instructor has set up and then develop it on their own. Sometimes that occurs in class discussion when students seize a topic that the instructor mentions and start to argue about it in a focused and productive manner. The instructor is often tempted to jump in, but the best thing is to shut up and get out of the way.
It took me many years to realize that less can be more in teaching -- that, in the end, the instructor must disappear from the learning process, and students must learn on their own. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that simple truth; as an undergraduate and even as a graduate student, I mainly learned on my own. Indeed, I came to believe that the main point of course work was to direct me to the library and show me how to use what I found there.
The single best course I taught in 40 years was the last one: an undergraduate class on Beat Generation writers. I finally understood that my job was to set up interesting classes in ways that encouraged students to explore the subject matter. Almost every student rose to the challenge: They built upon the assigned works that we discussed and then went off and studied the writers and topics that most interested them.
One student discovered that the papers of the Beat poet Diane DiPrima were in the University of Louisville library, and she traveled there to examine them. She subsequently used photocopies of some of DiPrima’s drafts as illustrations for her class presentation on this writer. Many other students ended up doing superb major projects and take-home final exams, and they earned high grades in the course.
So, my final and best piece of advice for good teaching is: Construct interesting courses, with the logistics clear from the first day, and then get out of the way. If you have done your job, students will learn on their own -- and that knowledge will stay with them long after they have left your classroom.
Murray Sperber, a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, has written four books about college sports and college life, including Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (Henry Holt, 2000).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 3, Page B20