Like most academics, I tend to view the year as running from September to August—from hopeful beginnings to wintry midyear drudgery to the lovely summertime.
So late August and early September are when I usually resolve to become a better teacher, undertake a new writing project, complete an old one, or improve myself as a faculty member in some way or another. Those months are also when I resolve to paint the bedroom, fix the loose doorknobs in the house, and spend more time reading and exercising, but we all know that stuff is never going to happen.
This year I’ve taken up a new role at my college, trading in slightly less than half of my course load for the opportunity to helm our honors program. The prospect of a new position has given me some extra enthusiasm for the new year and inspired me to formulate some new year’s resolutions that I believe will help enhance the teaching and learning process in my classrooms. I share them here in the hopes of inspiring others.
Experiment more. I have been pretty cautious about embracing new classroom technology. Two years ago, I wrote a column in this space (“A Brain and a Book”) that expressed my reservations about what I saw as a rush to discover and incorporate new media into the teaching-and-learning process. I do tend to move hesitantly into new technologies in most areas of life—I still use a brush and soap instead of aerosol shaving cream, for example—and that holds true in my approach to teaching.
But I’ve found that each time I’ve tried out a new technology in my courses, from PowerPoint to Blackboard, it has forced me to look hard at what I want to accomplish and think about whether that technology helps or hurts. Some innovations have remained with me after the initial foray; others I have discarded. But each experiment made me turn off the automatic pilot and take a closer look at my teaching.
With all of the demands on our time, the ease with which we can slip into automatic pilot in our teaching lives—same classes, same texts, same assignments, same attitudes toward our students—means that we sometimes need a nudge to help us stop and look around. Considering a new technology in my teaching has always played that role for me.
Henceforth, be it resolved that I will make use of one new technology in the classroom this semester.
I’ll have some help on that one. I am teaching a course in our honors program with another instructor who has had students create podcasts as an assignment in her courses. She will be leading me, kicking gently but probably not screaming, into trying such an assignment in our shared course.
Make use of campus events. Both of my courses this semester are for freshmen only. So for a few dozen students on our campus, I will be one of the first models they see of a college professor, and my course will help set their initial expectations for what a college course should be. I want to take that responsibility more seriously than I have in the past by helping students understand how to take full advantage of their education—especially outside the classroom.
I have always tried to convey to freshmen some of the basic information they need to survive in college—how to read a syllabus, take notes, study, etc.—but this semester I want to help them understand that they can play an important role in building an intellectual and artistic environment here on the campus.
I taught a course last year that required us to incorporate some extracurricular activities into our syllabus (such as public lectures and discussions, and field trips), and I was immensely pleased with how they opened up new lines of discussion in the classroom and helped students see the full range of experiences available to them. I want more of that, for both me and them.
But those events don’t happen unless they have an audience, and so I want to push my students to pay more attention to the broader intellectual and artistic life here on the campus. I want them to set side the Xbox or the Wii on occasion and go see a play.
Henceforth, be it resolved that all of my courses this academic year will incorporate at least one event outside the classroom. I will require attendance at the event, just like I would in a regular class, and will tie it to a writing assignment.
That should be a simple resolution to fulfill. We have lectures, films, and plays here on a weekly basis; we have a world-class art museum within minutes of the campus; we have a half-dozen other colleges or universities within a few miles of us. Finding at least one event each semester that will correlate with any course I teach should not prove challenging.
Of course there will always be one or two students in each class who have some scheduling conflict with the event I choose. In the past, that kind of logistical problem has made me reluctant to rely on outside events. But I think the benefit that this resolution will offer to the majority of the students outweighs the small bit of thinking and maneuvering I will have to do in order to accommodate problems.
Making better use of space. In my July column on the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, I asked faculty members to suggest “nudges” that could improve the teaching and learning process, and received some good responses on the subject of organizing classroom spaces. I hope to tackle that issue more fully in a future column, but for the time being, the responses convinced me that I have not been paying enough attention to that issue.
I had admitted that I tend to accept whatever arrangement of desks I find in the classroom when I walk in, even though I believe that having students face one another works the best for my discussion-based classes—desks in a circle or horseshoe, for example.
Amy Shuffelton, an assistant professor of educational foundations at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, pointed out that it will take just a day or two to break myself of the habit, and that I can enlist students to help me do it. “I make the students rearrange the desks (into a U shape or circle) as soon as they walk in on the first day of class,” Amy wrote to me, about her own classroom-arrangement philosophy. “As soon as that gets established as the classroom norm, they do it automatically every class thereafter.”
Martie Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa, made a similar point about the importance of enlisting students to help create the desired classroom arrangement. “I have my students sit in six circles of six students each,” she says. “I tell them on the first day that when they come into the classroom, they should arrange the chairs so that by the time I arrive, they are already sitting in their circles. After about three class sessions with my reminders, they are good to go for the semester.
“A colleague who teaches after me uses the U-shape configuration. His students come into the classroom while I am packing up, and by the time I leave, the U-shape is completed; again, the students do this before my colleague even arrives.”
Henceforth be it resolved that, for the coming semester, I will establish the circle configuration as the default on the first day of my courses, and that I will ask students to help create it in all subsequent courses.
Three is the magic number, as I was taught by Schoolhouse Rock many years ago, so I won’t overburden my new year. Three resolutions for my classroom teaching should be enough to shake up my usual pedagogical practices a bit, and perhaps open me up to new ideas.
But I’ll finish by asking for a resolution from each of you, dear readers. I hope to continue to bring to light issues and practices related to teaching and learning that would benefit a wide variety of college and university faculty members. You can help. If you have colleagues, programs, or institutions that are experimenting with new approaches, or who are conducting or publishing important research about teaching and learning in higher education, let me know about it.
I like the circle arrangement in my classroom because I find that 20 people thinking through a question together produces better results than me just standing up there and giving my answers. The same will be true here. So I resolve to arrange the desks of this column into a circle, if you’ll resolve to raise your hand now and again and let me know what you’d like to hear about.