My Teaching Story in Three Chapters

Generally, there are two ways to become a college professor. Door number one involves earning an advanced degree in an academic discipline and then landing an assistant professor position. This is the most common path in many of the liberal arts disciplines. Door number two, involves working in a profession for a while before obtaining a faculty position and this path is more common in professional fields such as engineering, social work, nursing and accounting. Unfortunately, what these two paths have in common is that neither path provides much preparation or training in pedagogy.

Chapter One-Teaching as Telling

I followed door number two and worked as a social worker for a decade before becoming a college professor. When I first stepped into the classroom in 2000, I thought of teaching as telling. I knew a lot of stuff. I would tell them and then they would know a lot of stuff. I did not know Benjamin Bloom from Judy Blume.

My greatest strengths were that I conveyed caring and treated my students with respect. They responded with generally positive evaluations of my teaching. Daniel Willingham (2009) writes that college students basically look for two things in a professor: “Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?” I was both of those things so my students liked me. I earned tenure and all was swell...

Chapter Two--Houston, we may have a problem

All was swell, except that I would occasionally talk with colleagues who would say things like: “I don’t like to pour knowledge into my students’ heads and then have them regurgitate it on the exam. I teach them to think.” To which I would nod politely. The only problem being that I had no idea how to teach a person to think!

These conversations left me uncomfortable because while teaching students to think seemed like a worthwhile goal, I was not sure exactly how to do that. I began to get a vague sense that there was more to teaching than information transmission, but I was not sure what to do instead. I designed more active learning activities, but I still felt that I was feeling my way by trial and error.

In addition, there was something that perplexed me. My colleagues said that education was more than just accumulating knowledge (and I agreed), but the smartest people I knew and the most educated people I knew seemed to possess a wide and deep body of knowledge in their fields.

Chapter Three--Teaching for Understanding

After teaching for several years, I was invited to join a team of faculty that helped design curriculum. This was a very impressive group of thoughtful teachers. (They let me in by accident.) We would meet regularly to discuss proposed courses and aid our faculty colleagues in designing their courses. The other members of the team talked knowingly about powerful concepts such as higher-order thinking, scaffolding, inquiry, discovery, and formative assessment. They were good critical thinkers who did not fall for the latest fad, but instead looked at ideas through a critical lens. They were appropriately skeptical but open-minded. While working with this group, I read books such as How People Learn and Understanding by Design. I earned a Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education.

Gradually, my philosophy as a teacher coalesced. I am a designer who carefully and intentionally designs learning experiences around essential questions, big ideas, and enduring understandings. But I did not need to jettison all knowledge transmission. In the classic book Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe write: “You cannot understand without subject matter knowledge” (p. 10). Foundational knowledge is necessary but not sufficient.

Now I use direct or explicit methods such as lecture, demonstrations, videos when there is essential foundational knowledge that they will need. However, I am selective. Is this really essential knowledge? Is this “nice to know” stuff? Will this relate to other ideas in the discipline? Can it be applied vertically (as they progress in this field) and horizontally (across other disciplines and professions)? I also use active learning to encourage my students to discover and inquire, to wrestle with questions, to examine assumptions.

With this blend of direct instruction and active learning, I have finally found my voice and identity as a teacher.

References

These are two books that have had a significant influence on me as a teacher.

Wiggins G. & McTighe, J. (2006) Understanding by Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Willingham, D. (2010) Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.