Teaching Tuesday: Threshold Concepts, Failure, and Thinking

A bunch of grading, a long car ride, and a good conversation with my brother who is a K-12 principal combined to get me thinking about teaching next semester. Each year, I try to balance between specific teaching goals associated with individual classes (e.g. to introduce students to research methods or the narrative of Byzantine history) and larger conceptual concerns that should, if I manage to remain undistracted, influence how I go about achieving my more specific goals. My capacity to engage with such bigger picture issues tends to ebb and flow as the pressures from research and service impinge on my teaching and I invariably get distracted by the day-to-day affairs of class. This is particular true when I’m teaching new or heavily revised classes.  

That said, I’m still going to do what I can next semester to focus on three big picture things.  

1. Scaffolding Threshold Concepts. One of the challenges that my methods class faced this past semester is that I travelled a bit and this interrupted some of my efforts to scaffold the class’s threshold concept: understanding the relationship between an author’s thesis and the historiography. This concept is central to understanding that history isn’t the pious reproduction of the past, but rather participation in a conversation developed by historians and standing at the intersection of the past and the present. The students demonstrate their understanding of this concept by writing a proposal for a research project, and this is the final assignment in the class. 

At present, I have tended to approach the concept of historiography from a big picture perspective. In other words, the first six weeks of the class focused on a survey of the discipline of history starting with Homer and Herodotus and ending with Chakrabarty. The result of this is that when students start to dig into the specifics of their research topic, they find the nuanced interaction between contemporary historians a bit obscure in its subtlety.

My class in the spring will do more to reinforce the link between the general pattern of historiography and the specifics of historiography relevant to their proposal’s more narrow topic. In other words, the scaffolding will serve not only to reinforce the idea that history is the conversation among historians, but also to help them find their way from the general conversation to the more specific one relevant to this research.  

2. Creating Tolerance for Failure. For many of my students, college is a high stakes games. The cost, the stress, and the weight of expectations make every move in the college classroom seem fraught. As a result, students often work hard to mitigate risk even at the expense of higher learning goals. The most common form of risk mitigation is to fall back on habits that brought success in high school. As a result, critical book reviews often become book reports, research proposals often turn into short research papers, and assignments often become exercises in compliance.

This creates a situation where I either have to force students to engage in high risk assignments and increase student anxiety or I have to create a greater tolerance for failure by explaining to the students that I’d rather they take a risk and come up short than avoid risk all together. Students, however, are skeptical and need to be convinced that the course is a safe space where they can push themselves without the risk of failure damaging their grade.

In my experience this level of trust has to be built over the course of the semester. Moreover, this involves replacing any motivation that comes from the fear of failure with the idea that risk taking is a surer pathway to success and failure is part of the learning process. 

3. The Irreducibility of Thinking. One of the most intriguing conversations that I had with my brother was about the idea that thinking is irreducible. That is to say that thinking is neither a gateway to some fundamental skillset or part of a larger process. Thinking as thinking is an aim in and of itself.

Few of us naturally enjoy thinking, but like any skill it is possible to practice it and for it to become easier. Thinking about thinking as a goal that is not dependent on a series of skills or techniques (or assessments) is intriguing to me. I’m still not entirely sure how to operationalize it in the classroom, but I wonder whether some of my experiments in punk praxis inadvertently relate to this way of conceiving the educational process.