“The best college and university teachers,” writes Ken Bain, “create a safe environment in which students can try, come up short, receive feedback, and try again.”
The truth of that pedagogical principle — from Bain’s book What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, 2004) — was never more apparent to me than when I was at the bottom of the pool in a local health club, trying desperately to roll my body in the correct direction and retrieve a mouthpiece that my scuba-diving instructor had just ripped from me.
We were near the end of the scuba course, and this session was devoted to recovering equipment that you might lose in a sudden current or other accident underwater. My fellow students and I were swimming in laps around the bottom of the pool, like a school of oversized fish, and our instructor was darting in between us, pulling off people’s fins and masks and doing anything else he could think of to disrupt a normal dive situation.
Our job was to follow the instructions we had been given during the hourlong “dry” portion of the course, which had preceded our weekly work in the water. When you lose your mouthpiece (or “regulator”), you are supposed to extend an arm straight ahead and roll in one direction, to allow the hose to snake up your body toward your hand. Like everything else that I learned in scuba diving, though, I quickly discovered that what the instructor said in the classroom gave me only the barest assistance when I was underwater.
When he snuck up behind me in the pool and yanked out my mouthpiece, I panicked. First I rolled in the wrong direction; then I rolled in the right direction but forgot to extend my arm to catch the hose. All the while the instructor floated patiently nearby, watching and giving me nonverbal reminders. Finally I reached out my arm, rolled in the correct direction, and found the regulator sliding down my arm and into my hand, from where I could pop it back into my mouth.
Later, I couldn’t help relating that experience to my own teaching practices. When I stood in front of the classroom, told students how to write, and sent them off to their dorms to draft their essays, did they feel exactly as I had felt underwater: panicked and uncertain how to take what I had heard and actually make use of it? Worse still, were they feeling that way knowing that I was unavailable to help? Was I doing the pedagogical equivalent of ripping out their regulators and then simply swimming away?
In the semesters following the scuba course, I began to experiment with moving my teaching away from telling and toward doing. I devised as many methods as I could to provide students with opportunities to try out their writing skills in the classroom — with me watching and guiding — so that when they had to write for a grade, they were trying something for the second, third, or fourth time.
But my transition from conventional teaching methods to this other model — which is more common in the fine arts than in English courses — has been slow, since it has required me to entirely rethink what I do in the classroom. And while sometimes this hands-on style requires less energy from me in the classroom, it often requires far more planning than I would do for a conventional lecture or discussion.
Last spring I was able to convert another aspect of my course to the “studio” pedagogical style. It turned out to be my best success yet, so I thought I would share the story here. I was teaching a course called “Contemporary British Novel.” In order to supplement the texts we were reading with some historical and cultural context, I asked each student to give a 10-to-15-minute presentation to the class on a British work of art in a genre other than fiction. That meant that they could offer presentations on film, television shows, or even rock music.
I thought the assignment would elicit some interesting presentations, since it gave students the opportunity to present on topics they were excited about — one student did Pink Floyd’s The Wall, another did the BBC television series The Office, and so on.
However, after the day came and went, I just about gave up hope of ever seeing great presentations from my students. They may have been interested in their topics, but they clearly had not practiced or timed themselves, despite my multiple injunctions. One student’s presentation lasted for almost 30 minutes, even in the face of repeated hints to wrap it up.
Fast forward to the fall of 2008. I am teaching a course in which students are required to write a thesis proposal and defend it at the end of the semester (they write the actual thesis in their senior year. So while I have mostly sworn off presentations at this point, the structure of the course requires me to use them one last time.
As presentation time approaches, I decide that I simply cannot bear to sit through another set of unrehearsed, undertimed rambles. I have no degree in public speaking, so I don’t feel qualified to give detailed instructions on it. But as someone who speaks frequently in public, I know that most of the problems we encounter in public speaking can be improved by practice.
“On the class before the presentations,” I announce to my students, “you must be prepared to give the first two minutes of your presentation to the class. That’s it — just the first two minutes. Rehearse it and be ready.”
With 15 students in a 75-minute class, and figuring time for transition and critique, that meant I had to give up an entire class period — no content that day at all, just helping them improve their presentations. I was not at all sure that the effort would be worth the lost time.
When rehearsal day arrived, I asked the first student to begin. I let her speak for about three sentences, which were stiff and clearly memorized, before I stopped her.
“Hang on a second,” I said. “Start over.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Nope. I just want you to start over.”
She began again, speaking a little more confidently. I let her go another few sentences.
“Wait,” I said, interrupting again. She gave me a pained look. Students were looking at me, and at one another, with bewilderment.
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” I said. “But just start over again for me.”
A chill descended on the room at that moment, as students began to wonder why on earth I was torturing this poor student. Her third time around was much better, as she found her way into her own words, so I let her continue for a while.
At the end of some technical explanation she gave about her material, I asked her to stop and describe it for me in her own words without looking at her notes. She put down her notes and broke out of the rigid posture in which she had been standing in order to explain what she meant.
“That’s better,” I said. “Say it like that in the presentation.”
“OK,” she said, and then resumed her presentation where she had left off.
“No, no,” I interrupted. “Say it like that right now in the presentation.”
“Go back and do it again?” she said.
“Yes, go back and do it again. And don’t look at your notes.”
And so it went for the next 70 minutes, as I asked student after student to repeat false starts, clear up technical material or jargon, and put away written notes. The room went from a climate of fear and anxiety to one of laughter and relaxation as the students picked up on what was happening and saw that all I was trying to teach them were the virtues of practice and rehearsal.
There were a few bad moments. One student was so nervous and stammering it was painful to watch, and I thought interrupting her would do more harm than good. So I just let her talk. Eventually, I think, she realized that nobody was going to rescue her, and she locked in and worked her way through her nerves. That was no great pedagogical moment of mine — I just didn’t know what else to do.
The following week the students gave their presentations, and they were, by far, the best student talks I have ever seen. It could not have been clearer that every one of them had gone back to their rooms and rehearsed and timed themselves until they had it right. Some were better than others, but even the worst would have beaten out almost any presentation I had seen before.
Afterward, when I had a chance to reflect on it, I came back to the quote from Ken Bain’s book and realized that my selfish unwillingness to sit through any more terrible presentations had led to the kind of environment that he describes. I had given students the chance to try, fail, get some guidance, and try again. When I spoke about this experience to a group of faculty members recently, one of them lamented that we shouldn’t have to spend our class time on such rehearsals — that’s what public-speaking courses are for, he said, and we should require students to take such courses.
Agreed. In a perfect world, someone else would teach them how to give presentations, and I would reap the benefits of that instruction and focus on the content of my course. Until that perfect world arrives, however, I will never again ask students to give successful presentations without first giving them the chance, a week or two in advance, to fail.