The Cadaver Synod: Or, a Slightly Optimistic Pre-Mortem Autopsy of University Teaching Practices (part two)

By Clinton Thomas Bland

(Click here for part one)

1. You are not the most important person in the room. The conference environment breeds bad habits. Short speeches disguised as questions, questions which boil down to: “but what do you think of me?” This approach is fine for conferences, but not for the classroom. Your main concern is not what you think, but what your students think, and why they think it. You are the expert, of course, but your attitude needs to be one of help and care, not of right and wrong. What do you want them to know? What questions should they be able to ask? What skill or knowledge set are they learning today and how are you going to scaffold and differentiate* it so that everyone achieves it? Your students don’t want a lecture on how brilliant your ideas are. They want you to explain those ideas in the context of other ideas in a way they can understand. They want help making their own meaning—this is not the same thing as accepting your meaning. They pay good money to listen to you, so listen to them.

2. You can always improve.  The university classroom lends itself to lecturing. This is not a problem if you are a brilliant lecturer. Unfortunately, most professors are not Carl Sagan. This is the same line of advice that posits that you shouldn’t tell jokes if you aren’t funny. If kids are falling asleep, it’s for one of two reasons: they are hung over, or you are boring and therefore failing. Being boring is not a sin, but it is a death sentence for student engagement and learning. Videotape yourself lecturing. If you’re like me, you’ll be appalled. The only choice is to try new strategies. Having letters after your name is not the equivalent of being a good teacher. You, me, everybody, once sucked at something. Respect is not earned with a degree. It’s okay. You have those letters because you got better. P.S. The lecture has its place, but that place is not day to day.

3. Your students will follow you if you give them a reason to. It is cliché to say that great teachers inspire, but that’s what it boils down to, especially in areas like religion, degrees for which place the people who hold them at an economic disadvantage; critical thinking is not a skill that can be marketed like EXCEL. Thus, it is your job to make students believe that what you teach is valuable. Just saying this isn’t enough. You need to make connections for them and have them make their own. This is something that I do every day. The Hobbit, which I read with my kids, has very little to do with anything they encounter in their day to day lives, but once it’s made clear to them that there are issues of race and gender woven throughout it, that yes, you can make  connection, however fanciful between the Alamo and Thorin’s last stand (Texas history is taught in seventh grade), the text comes to life. Whether we like it or not, we have to make everything we teach matter to them in their world now. The days of knowledge for its own sake are largely over, we have to economize everything and sneak in the critical thinking.

  4. They need to be able to talk to each other. The ideas they bounce off you are just as important as the one they bounce off their peers. We call it “Think-Pair-Share”, and it’s a teacher’s best friend. It helps shy kids get over the shyness. It forces them to refine their ideas before throwing them out to the whole class—seriously, try it and see how quickly that one kid with the inane ideas who loves the sound of his own voice starts to taper off his hand-raising so the kid in the back can talk. The know-it-all has just been edited and you didn’t even have to do anything. You’ll get better comments, you’ll have fuller discussions, and you’ll foster a more egalitarian sensibility in your classes because everyone will be heard every day by at least one other person—we call them shoulder buddies because everything in elementary and secondary education has to have a name.

5. Formative assessment is the most important assessment. This is something that one sees almost none of at the university level. How often do you find out what your students did and didn’t learn only after they’ve bombed the test? It’s demoralizing for you, for them, and it means (if you’re a nice professor who cares) a lot of remediation and office hours that could have been spent on other things being monopolized by criers and grade-grubbers. Formative assessment helps you recalibrate and you don’t even have to grade it—in fact, you’re not supposed to. It goes like this: almost every day, my students spend the last five minutes or so writing and reflecting about what they learned. Sometimes I give them a specific question: What are the roles of religion and science in The Wendigo? Sometimes I give them a vague one: What are you confused by? What do you want to know more about? Sometimes they write questions for me. These brief, written pieces allow me to rethink my lesson plans in almost real time and allow the students to feel that they’ve been heard. When it comes time for a test, I can feel confident that they won’t self-immolate, because I know they know the material. Students are happy when they’re challenged, and they’re even happier when they get an A.

6. Treat your learning data with the same importance as your research data. Scholars are good at reflecting on what their reading, field work and experimentation has told them. If they dedicated a quarter of the same energy to why the grades fell the way they did at the end of the term, their lives would be better, and maybe the ones who hate teaching would find it more rewarding. Data tells you what you’ve done well, and what you’ve whiffed. If you strengthen the weaknesses, your students will be happier and you’ll get better reviews and people will start to see what you do as valuable. This is crucial in humanities where the ethereal nature of what we teach is easily seen as fat to be trimmed at budget time.

7. They like technology (some of the time). If you have the resources to incorporate it into lessons, do it. But don’t overdo it. I have thirty iPads in my classroom, but we don’t use them every day. Physical products have meaning, and are often beautiful, but if it can be done with an app or online faster and easier, take advantage of it. They also need to move around. If you can think of an activity that has them up and out of their seats, use it.

8. They need to know that you're prepared and happy to see them. They can tell when you're unprepared and not happy to see them. Being an expert on a topic is not the same as being a person who can engage young people for fifty minutes on that same topic. And… if you think of teaching as a burden, maybe don’t take a job that involves teaching. Yes, academia is primarily focused on the production of knowledge, but I really do wish that hiring committees would make it clear that the transfer of that knowledge face-to-face and the love for that process is wildly important. Candidates who don’t agree need to seek other employment.
  
9. A lesson plan is not constituted solely of a reading selection and a list of questions. Design and content are not the same thing. You know what you want them to know, but how are you going to get them to know it? If your answer is a reading selection, a lecture and a whole group discussion every day of the semester, you’re doing it wrong.  Just do a quick search: activities for teaching _____________.  Somebody will likely have already done all of the work for you. Change it up. Make it fun. Hell, do an art project once in a while. I only wish I’d thought to use Instagram in the college classes I taught. The more your classroom feels like the classrooms they came from, especially when they’re freshman, the happier they’ll be and the more engaged they’ll be. They’ll learn more and you will look good. Yes, some students thrive in the reading/lecture/whole group discussion paradigm. They are called graduate students, and as 30 Rock has taught us, they are the worst. Resist the urge to cater to this learning style in undergraduate courses. 

That is all I have to say to you. These are effective strategies. I know because I ran them by my kids first. If you use them you’ll be doing a better job and your students will perform better. I don’t want to beat up the corpse of the university (see title), or to burn it down. I want to save it. I just happen to believe that a large part of that mission happens in the classroom, not the lab or the field. We can improve the lot of the university by improving the teaching that happens there, by adding more value in the classroom. I hate to boil so much of this discussion down to simple economics, I really do, but please don’t blame me. You can address complaints to that nice building on the newer part of campus—it has a sign that says “School of Business” hanging over the door.

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Clint Bland teaches gifted and talented seventh grade English in Colleyville, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University and holds an MA in religious studies from The University of Kansas. He continues to be interested in religion, but now focuses mainly on gifted education advocacy, educational equity for underserved and disadvantaged gifted kids, curriculum design, and humanities integration. You can follow him on the Twitter @ClintBlandHMS

*These are fancy words. Loosely translated, they mean: your students are having their needs met based on prior knowledge, talent level, learning styles, demographics, etc.