Call for Tips and Tricks: Teaching

Thus far this blog -- like many others -- has focused primarily on research and professional issues, but not so much on teaching.I'd like, then, to change the subject a bit, and ask you, the community, to share some of the tips and lessons you've learned about teaching.  Here are some of mine:

• Tip #1 -- Maintain high standards: There is a real temptation to be an easy grader, especially if you're a hard grader and haven't learned yet how to do it well (see 2, below). Don't succumb to this temptation. Students may grumble and complain about bad grades. Still, you owe it to students to challenge them, and you should have the integrity to do it. Moreover, in the longer run -- at least in my experience -- students actually tend to appreciate difficult professors. As shallow and as short-sighted as many students might seem at first (and many of them do seem to want a diploma more than anything else), in my experience this is mostly a front. Students don't realize how much they really want to learn until they are challenged to learn. I can't emphasize this enough. I've had many a diploma-hunting student -- students who weren't the least bit interested in philosophy -- actually get into it and enjoy doing philosophy once they were challenged to do it well. You'd be suprised how many students really like a challenge -- and who can really begin to dig philosophy -- provided they are challenged in the right way. Which brings me to...

• Tip #2 -- Give examples of good and bad work: In my experience, students tend to begin to like philosophy, and see it as a challenge worth doing, only once they have a real idea of what is expected of them. They don't like receiving bad grades on papers if they feel like they had no idea what you wanted out of them. They feel a lot less bad -- and more apt to work hard to improve their work -- if you give them examples of strong and poor student papers. After all, once you do this, if they write a bad paper, you can point to one of the bad papers you gave them as examples and show them, "See, you did that...", and then point at a good paper and say, "...when you should have done this." In that case, they can't do what they otherwise tend to do -- blame their bad grades on you, the Evil Professor. Instead, they are forced to confront the simple fact that they didn't do what you gave them good examples of, and they will tend to take responsibility for their work.

• Tip #3 -- Give lots of comments, and opportunities to re-do work: In my very first philosophy course as an undergraduate (with Dan Dennett!), Dan gave each of us an opportunity to re-write and resubmit each of our (five) papers as many times as we wished until the final day of class. It was perhaps the most important experience I ever had as a student, and it is now a standing policy in all of my classes. Yes, it is a ton a work for me. I do it, however, because I see the results. I see most of my students go from doing bad work to doing good work. I see them starting to do philosophy. So I think I owe it to them, and it is worth it. Now, of course, such a policy just isn't possible in large classes (my classes top out at 25 students). Still, I think it's something worth doing, to the extent that one can. The way I see it, my job is to do what I can to help each and every student leave my class knowing how to write a decent philosophy paper. Insofar as students want good grades, the opportunity to resubmit papers for a higher grade gives each of them strong incentives to actually improve their work -- and in my experience a vast majority of them show tremendous improvement as a result.

• Tip #4 -- Make the classroom about them, not you: Many of us like to be the "Sage on Stage." Giving a bad-ass lecture to a class full of undergrads can feel great...but I don't think it does them much good. Yes, you may "wow" them, but they won't understand a tenth of what you said once they leave the room, and they certainly won't know how to do philosophy much better themselves for watching you do it in front of them. Practice, as they say, makes perfect -- but your practicing does little for them.  They need to practice philosophy themselves, and you need to give them a forum to do it. But how? One of the biggest challenges I had coming to the University of Tampa were our school's inordinately long class periods. Instead of 50 minute classes MWF, ours are 1:15 minutes.  Instead of 1:15 minute classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, ours are two hours. Let me tell you, undergrads do not want to watch you lecture about the Categorical Imperative for two hours. I learned that the hard way my first semester! Anyway, my experience at UT challenged me to come up with other classroom strategies. Two strategies in particular have worked well so far: (A) group work, specifically, in-class competitions for bonus points, where I require them to work together to put together and/or criticize arguments from their daily readings, and (B) a a daily assignment to submit, and raise in class, questions/worries about the daily readings (questions which I grade pretty rigorously for philosophical incisiveness). 

I realize that many of my tips won't work for larger class sizes, but perhaps they can be extended to larger classes in some sort of attenuated manner. Don't know. Anyway, those are some of my (admittedly anecdotal) teaching tips. I hope some of you find them interesting and/or helpful. I'm more than happy to discuss them in the comments section, but I'd also like to ask you all to share any teaching tips (or difficulties!) of your own.

Comments

[Moti Mizrahi]

Hi Marcus,
Thanks for sharing these great tips. Regarding #4, I agree with you that "the sage on the stage" approach is not a particularly effective teaching method. But I have been wondering why that is the case (especially when I see how popular the courses of the likes of Shelly Kagan and Michael Sandel are). If you don't mind, maybe I will do a follow-up post on this question.

[Marcus Arvan]

I'd love to see a follow-up post on that! Fwiw, here are a couple of thoughts. I think students like to be entertained, and that this liking leads people to become Sages on Stage. But entertainment and real education are two different things. Being a real educator involves a great deal of risk. It involves doing things that students don't like -- things like having *them* do work in the classroom, and giving them bad grades for poor work. In my experience, in the end -- oftentimes only after the semester is long over -- most students cherish this sort of treatment more than sagely entertainment. They see that they have learned important things, and we're not merely entertained. Btw, I don't mean to derogate Sandel or Kagan in the slightest (I've never seen either of them teach!). I think it's fine to make the classroom an entertaining place. I just think it's crucial to have students be active participants (something I've heard second-hand that Sandel does very well).