Sharing teaching 'breakthroughs'?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Some readers might remember a post I made a long while ago about how I have struggled with teaching for 10+ years, tried *all* sorts of techniques&adjustments and nothing really changed. But I think I *might* have made a breakthrough recently. The recent classes have felt different from all classes in the past, in that I observe that students became very focused during class.

The turning point was that I had to lecture on something that I didn't feel I understand well, and also didn't have the time to really figure it out, for the first time. So I just explained the literature as it is, without any layer of my original perspective or understanding. Somehow that ended up very positively. It has a consistently positive result since I followed that style. I just want to share this story with the readers of cocoon.

Another reader submitted a follow-up comment (which I don't normally allow, but did in this case since it is in effect an independent request for 'help'):

would you be willing to tell us a little more about what you mean, perhaps in a standalone post? As someone who is adjusting to a newly increased teaching load and is feeling very overwhelmed, this is very intriguing.

I'd love to hear more, both from the OP and from other readers.

What 'teaching breakthroughs' have you made, and how do you think they made you a better teacher?

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

I don't know if I would characterize these as "breakthroughs," since I don't think I butted up against a metaphorical wall for a while until finally discovering these things and breaking through, but since they seem functionally quite similar to the example in the original question, here are some tips that I have found helpful:

1. To reiterate and expand on the point in the original question, your job as a teacher is not to form your own view of a topic and then shove it into the students. Your job as a teacher is to create an environment where the students can form their own views about the topic. To do that they need help engaging with the topic, and in principle, hearing what you think about it can help them. But that's just one of a thousand possibilities, and unless you present your view with the goal of helping students engage with the topic themselves, as opposed to presenting it for some other purpose or in some other manner, you're probably wasting your time and theirs.

2. Similarly and more broadly, once you conceive of your job not as transferring knowledge from your brain to their brains but as creating a space for them to grow, you free yourself from lots of the most time-consuming and ineffective methods of teaching, like lecturing with the goal of sticking information in their heads or thinking you have to have perfect knowledge of whatever you're teaching before you teach it.

3. Following from those last two points, I suggest reading Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster and the National Research Council's How Students Learn. (The latter is long but you can skip most of the STEM-focused stuff. You can also read instead or in addition the book How People Learn, also by the National Research Council, which in some ways is superior.) These help prompt some thoughts about what to do if your job is not to smush information into people's brains, and some thoughts about why that's not your job.

4. Get a sense for how much preparation you need to successfully teach something and don't do more than that. You can always do more, but there are diminishing returns, and you do a disservice to yourself and your students if you burn yourself out by working far past the point of reasonable return.

5. Figure out what the most effortful parts of your teaching are and look closely at whether you need to be doing them. What is it they accomplish (if anything...) and can this be accomplished by other strategies that require less effort?

6. Always keep in mind that you are one of the best students who has ever existed and that you have spent basically all of your professional life from PhD onwards surrounded by similarly excellent students. Almost nobody is so obsessed with philosophy that they want to teach it for a living. Most of your students, even the best ones, don't care about philosophy anywhere near as much as you, and are not approaching the material the way you approached it as an undergraduate or the way your colleagues approached it as an undergraduate. Think about your course the way your students think about your course and consider whether what you are doing is working for them, not about whether it would have worked for you.

[G]

I probably would not call this a breakthrough, but a radical change is that I stopped lecturing on most topics in my classes. When I call it "discussion-based", I mean it. I went from around 30% of class-time for discussion to 80%-90%. I spend a lot of time (often more than needed) to design discussion questions. We usually spend most of the time discussing a topic or question for the first half of the class. Then I introduce a philosopher's view, and we talk about this view.

[Marcus Schultz-Bergin]

Two big changes I made that have made a world of difference:

1. Permanent small groups with activities that have a clear product. This supercharged discussion in the class, over attempting "full class" discussions which typically only meant a few folks spoke. It also improved the group work by giving students time, across the semester, to develop norms of working together, in contrast to changing groupings constantly. And, finally, requiring a clear product, as opposed to suggesting they "discuss among themselves" or something, helped promote a more structured and, ultimately, more educational discussion within those groups. Importantly, by "clear product", I don't simply mean an answer to a question. Rather, the group must reach a consensus that involves taking a stand on some issue. And, typically, they 'select' an answer from a set, so that their focus is on WHY their answer is correct rather than attempting to creatively develop an answer. Often, along the way, they are simply attempting to collectively answer some questions, but always in the service of a final decision or other product.

2. Specifications grading. I adopted it fully in my courses, but the best part is evaluating things like essays using specifications. Effectively, just a "holistic rubric" where rather than assigning points or percentages to various dimensions of the rubric, you establish a threshold of quality (they often say the equivalent of 'B+' work, but since that is pretty meaningless, just think 'high but not the highest standards') and then evaluate whether a student met that threshold. And they must meet it for ALL dimensions to 'pass' the assignment.

Of course, this means you must provide an opportunity to revise or redo work (which you do is largely dependent on the type of assignment). And so, while it would appear this approach would increase workload, I came to it when I first had to start teaching 4 courses a semester, all of which had to be writing intensive. It greatly reduced my workload, but also improved student work significantly. Here are a few reasons (some of which involved additional things I did related to the specifications grading):

A. Once students knew they simply wouldn't pass an essay if they (e.g.) didn't use paragraphs, rather than perhaps just lose a few points, all of a sudden they knew how to use paragraphs. More generally, the incentive structure of specs grading does encourage better quality initial work.

B. Having the specifications in advance, students could effectively self-assess. Obviously, they weren't perfect at it, and some simply didn't attempt, but nonetheless this improved the work. Relatedly, I also introduced a mandated "reflection and self-evaluation" process that required them to apply the standards and self-assess. They did it in class, on a printed copy of their paper on its due date. It reminded them of (e.g.) what a quality thesis statement looked like, asked them to rate their own, and also to mark it in their paper. Ultimately, they'd also be told to indicate to me which aspect of their writing (if any) they wanted feedback on. This enhanced quality, reduced conflict (several students would submit the work saying, "I now know I will have to revise this" and so weren't upset when that was my evaluation too) and sped up my evaluation process. If a student simply wasn't going to look at feedback, they'd write "no feedback please" and I wouldn't waste my time. They still got feedback on the dimensions they didn't pass, but most of that was done by the (holistic) rubric itself.

C. Evaluating "pass" or "not yet" according to clearly defined criteria meant I wasn't wasting time making fine discriminations that probably wouldn't matter and allowed me to no longer feel like I needed to 'justify the grade' and thus focus feedback on deficits. Instead, my feedback was always forward looking - "Here is how to do what you are already doing better" or (in the case of a student who passed but asked for advice on some aspect) "in the future, try this strategy".

This made grading way less burdensome, mentally and temporally. And improved my relationship with my students as they really felt like the point of the assignments was to function as a diagnostic and improve. I even got plenty to start announcing they were getting "bonus learning" when they had to revise, as I explicitly made clear that often the best learning happened in that revision process.

[shove away?]

Daniel Weltman says: "To reiterate and expand on the point in the original question, your job as a teacher is not to form your own view of a topic and then shove it into the students. Your job as a teacher is to create an environment where the students can form their own views about the topic."

That's certainly the norm in certain areas of philosophy (not all: it's not the norm in, e.g. logic)...but why is that the norm? Obviously it's not the norm in physics or biology or whatever.

One argument for why it's the norm in ethics (broadly construed) is that ethics turns on values and those are subjective and, therefore, we shouldn't shove our value onto students. But very few ethicists actually buy that values are subjective. So that doesn't seem like a great argument. Moreover, doing things that way inevitably—it seems to me—gives rise to a very dodgy was of thinking about ethical questions: instead of asking whether ɸ is permissible, it becomes a survey of what view X says about ɸ-ing, what view Y says about ɸ-ing, etc...without ever actually grasping with ɸ-ing itself. (This is made plain in the Good Place where the resident philosopher can't ever say whether anything is permissible, but only what different views says about it. The worst.)

But even if it works for ethics, it certainly doesn't work for, e.g., metaphysics or whatever—for those subjects that don't involve value judgements.

So, again, I wonder why Weltman's norm is the norm.

I also wonder whether it should be the norm. I'm inclined to think it shouldn't. On the subject of teaching breakthroughs, I started enjoying teaching much more once I stopped trying to conform to Weltman's norm. That's not to say I merely come in and give my view, but instead I come in and give my view and my view of why the other views aren't any good. I do my best to give those other views their best showing, but, in line with that, I also say why I think that showing ain't good enough. Classes have been more lively ever since: there's more at stake for students to bristle with, to argue with, etc.

Anyway. That's a long way of saying: shove away.