Teaching Tuesday: Teaching at UND

Over the last couple of years, our department has seen an infusion of new faculty. This is very exciting for us on a number of grounds (not the least of which is that some of us feared that our department was in terminal decline). Of course, some of our new faculty have been teaching at the University of North Dakota for years and simply joined the tenure-track rather than being new to our department. Others, however, are completely new to the institution. 

These new faculty are often eager to learn the ropes and understand both our students and our department. This desire to figure out how to fit in and be successful has prompted me to reflect on our students and our program as a prelude to articulating what new faculty might expect.

1. No so quiet any more. Years ago, when I started at UND, my colleagues told me that UND students were quiet and reserved. This may have been the case, but my experiences before and after the pandemic no longer bear this out. Our students are talkative, engaged, and interested, and if given the space in class, their curiosity will derail even the best designed lesson plan. If the first decade of my teaching career at UND focused on how to get our students to talk and the second decade of my teaching career (notwithstanding the COVID break) guiding our students to to discuss and engage with sources systematically.

2. The End of the Lecture. I’ve blogged about this before, but a second trend that I’ve observed both with my students and with myself is the end of the lecture as a useful mode of knowledge making. Our students struggle to take notes, on the one hand, and follow even the most carefully outlined lecture. On the other hand, they also see even brief lectures as invitations not to listen and learn, but to participate and engage. As a result, a formal lecture quickly falls apart as students in 

3. Scaffolding. Scaffolding assignments is one of the basic teaching techniques that most of us know, but perhaps fewer of us use than we care to admit. I know that I’ve tended to want to scaffold longer and more intensive writing assignments, but I often skip steps in the eagerness to get students to the writing earlier in the process. With the rise of LLM powered AI engines like Chat GPT, scaffolding will become all the more important in steering students away from the temptations of AI generated texts and toward the skill building work necessary to write well-organized, well-argued, and thoughtful papers.

4. Reading. For as long as I’ve been teaching college students, I have heard that our students don’t read. I have to admit that I sometimes found myself buying into this rhetoric until I started assigning fewer, longer, readings. Then, students read. This taught me three things. First, provide students with plenty of context for their reading. Second, if given enough time, students will read even longer books. And, finally, make sure that there is a payoff for doing the reading. In other words give them context, give them time, and give them a goal.

5. The Kids These Days. I don’t know what has changed over the last ten years, but the students in my classes are better than ever. They’re not just better in the generic way of being better prepared for college, but they’re bring to our classrooms a deeper curiosity than I remembered from the early 20th century. They also seem have a deeper sense of political, social, and even cultural awareness than students did a decade or so ago. This means that our students are looking to make connections, find deeper understanding, and take what they’re learning beyond the boundaries of the classroom. This raises the bar for us as teachers.