Three Teaching Things Thursday

My first week of classes is nearly done (well, technically, I still have 40% of my week to go, but let’s not quibble). Over the last few years, I’ve been convinced that part of what has left my teaching a bit flat lately isn’t my course preparation or even big picture pedagogical issues, but classroom management. 

Last semester, I worked a bit on how I facilitated discussion, how I modeled historical thinking, and how I provided feedback at various times of the semester, and I like to think that I discerned some real benefit both in student learning and the general “vibe” of the classroom. In fact, I felt that working on my classroom style had the potential to garner greater benefits that far more time consuming tweaks to content or broader pedagogy.

Along those lines, I have three goals this semester for my teaching.

1. Activating the Classroom in History 240: The Historians Craft. At some point over the last couple of years I figured out how to run classroom discussions. I just wish I knew what I did exactly. 

That said, the key to making this class work is to “activate the classroom.” This involves making students feel comfortable discussing often challenging texts during the first part of the semester, students will feel far more comfortable discussing the challenges that they face doing their own research later in the semester. One of the easiest ways to encourage students to speak, from what I can tell, is work to communicate a certain enthusiasm for the challenges associated with reading and interpretation difficult texts. 

That’s it mostly. I mean, I could refine my Socratic techniques, I could be more patient, and I could even incentivize participation, but it seems to me that just being excited in the classroom about a text stimulates students to take more risks and engage more fully.  

2. Professional Processes in English 334: Practicum in Editing and Publishing. This is a new class for me and I tried a new approach to my first day of class. Instead of a general warm up or going over the syllabus, I tried a “cold open” and dumped a bunch of information on the working of UND’s long-standing literary journal North Dakota Quarterly, on the students.This clearly overwhelmed them, but, on the other hand, it also seemed to energize them for a class that would give them real world experience and give them a chance to do some hands-on work that extends well beyond the classroom.

3. Modeling Thinking in History 105: World Civilizations I. Finally, my brother (who has had a career in K-12 education) stressed to me last spring the importance of modeling the kind of thinking that I would like to see in my students. This is something that I think that I understood tacitly, but probably didn’t put into use very effectively in my classes.

So this semester, instead of expecting students to figure out how to solve problems on their own (or collaboratively in groups), I’m going do some more modeling of how I’d go about solving a problem or approaching an assignment. I suspect this will help my students.