Teaching Thursday: Five Teaching Strategies

In this week’s Teaching Thursday blog post, my colleague Cindy Prescott offers 7 tips for new teachers. These are things that she wished she knew when she started teaching. I’m offering an alternate list of 5 things that I’ve learned to do since I started teaching. Unlike Cindy’s list, these are strategies that include a whole range of classroom behaviors and individual acts. No one strategy can carry a class, of course, but a robust group of strategic options has helped me negotiate the fine art of teaching.

And, yes, some of these strategies should be regarded in a light hearted way.

1. Improvise

One of the first things I do is attempt to establish rapport with students. Usually I show up to class early and attempt the famous “Caraher Banter”. 98% of the time this fails, but the students tend to notice the effort and eventually (after about 4 weeks) decide that engaging in a conversation with me is easier than watching be desperately chat to a silent room. This effort to establish rapport comes in handy when you realize that you only printed out the first two pages of your lecture for the day or somehow get things done too early. Having a bit of rapport with students also opens the door to productive conversations about both their performance in the class and my performance as a teacher. So, improvising a conversation with your students for 10 minutes before class starts forms the foundation for rapport and gives you a safety net if your plan (and back up plan) fail.

2. Own up to your weaknesses.

When I first started teaching, I tried to correct every weakness, that I couldn’t disguise.  Over the last 10 years, I’ve gradually moved to take the opposite tact. I come right out and tell the students my weaknesses. I talk too quickly. I can be disorganized, and if people give me things late, there is a better than even chance that I’ll loose it. Moreover, when things go poorly in class, I take part of the blame. While this strategy doesn’t always work (and can be really counter productive in a class that is skeptical of your abilities), I’ve found that selectively admitting that my plans (or lack there of) were unsuccessful paradoxically builds an expectation that my course design is successful. In other words, if I tell them from time to time that a particular approach or assignment was a failure, students will come to expect other course design decisions as successful unless otherwise informed.  Again, this doesn’t work all the time, but it is a strategy that forges that important bond of trust between me and my students (even if it ultimately involves some strategery on my part!).

3. Let students authorize themselves.

I have found that my personality can, if improperly deployed, create a particularly passive classroom. I like my own voice, I talk fast, and (generally speaking) I’m always right (see strategy 2 above – even when I’m wrong, you can’t be sure that I’m still not right). To counteract this tendency, I look for opportunities to authorize student participation in many aspects of course design.  For example, I regularly ask students whether they want a particular assignment or not and to help me set deadlines or dates for assignments and tests. I’ve found that students can think quite strategically about their own academic progress and can, with just a tiny bit of prompting, contribute to a course schedule and design that gives them better opportunities to succeed than my less unilateral scheduling imperative. Sometimes letting students decide how many tests and when they will happen or whether they want a longer assignment over a holiday weekend can catch the students off guard, but after a few prompts students catch on that I am genuinely willing to listen to their perspective on course organization. Again, this doesn’t always work and sometimes student priorities can be too divergent from my own course goals to move forward productive, but when it does work it can give students a greater sense of ownership over their classroom experiences.

4. Let Students Fail.

One of the most important thing my advisor taught me was that you have to give students enough room to be unsuccessful. I’ve contended that my dissertation was a bit of a disaster, but I learned more from my (relatively) failed dissertation project than many of my successful projects. Some of my best students in my classes are students who have failed the class once and are coming through for a second try. Every semester, I’ve gotten better and better at shaking off the feeling of rejection when a student does not attend my class regularly, blows off a major assignment, or appears distracted and uninterested. When I first started teaching, I treated each offense as an opportunity to swoop in teaching wings aglitter and gather up the fallen angel to show them that they too can fly! Now, I am far more willing to present the students with the tools they need to succeed in my class, remind them gently, and let them take their own path. Watching a student fail is still hard, but I also know that being unsuccessful sometimes is the best way to reinforce the value of good research design, study skills, attendance, or the sometimes elusive idea that faculty actually do know what they are talking about. Sometimes.

5. Fight Resistance.

When I first started teaching, I tended to see problematic students behaviors like poor classroom performance, lack of interest, late or incomplete assignments, or even disruptive behaviors, as isolated character flaws, my own unsuccessful communication strategies, or even poorly designed assignment or activities. While these reasons can hold for some isolated incidents, I have become increasingly convinced that students behave as they do consistently, across numerous classrooms and disciplines, in a systematic effort to resist the institutional expectations of the university. As the university has come to commodify learning (and the student experience) and the students (much less faculty) have felt increasingly like parts of an assessment machine, there is a growing culture of resistance among the student population that manifests itself political as a strain of age-old anti-intellectualism and on campus as student apathy.  Student behavior ranging from the veneration of Saint Monday, to legalistic readings of syllabi and assignments, to “lazy like a fox” attitudes toward unstructured learning environments, are all part and parcel of the kind of low-level (low-grid?) resistance strategies that are common in highly asymmetrical power relationships.

Fortunately, centuries of these practices have given faculty a robust toolkit for breaking student resistance. Some strategies involve (tactical and metaphorical) violence, some strategies involve collusion with the students (both apparent and real) and some strategies involve fighting the root causes of student resistance. Again, it’s not the only strategy in my teacherly tool kit, but recognizing resistance for what it is, can be an important step in negotiating the inevitable rough spots in the faculty-student relationship.