My Teaching Philosophy
When the first-semester doctoral students struggled to learn conceptual thinking skills, I brought out the Legos.
I hoped the dean wouldn’t hear us as the students, in small groups, playfully competed against each other (for a bag of Nerds candies) to fashion something clever from a Ziploc bag of toy building blocks and explicate the meaning. The atmosphere was more befitting a kindergarten classroom than a somber doctoral class. But the tactile exercise worked. When I asked the students why I had them play with blocks, they spent 20 minutes discussing what they had learned. Typologies or moderator-mediator models don’t come with instructions. The students could use only the blocks available, just as researchers are limited to the data they have. And a good model only works if it makes visual sense to others.
Legos may make for unconventional pedagogy, but students of all types and stripes learn by doing and by having fun. At 7:30 a.m., editing lab students would rather snooze than learn fact-checking skills. So I divide them into groups, have them choose a type of punctuation for their team name and compete (this time, for Smarties candies) to see which group can correctly guess at questions such as: Who invented the concept of survival of the fittest? How many Americans have been murdered since Sept. 11? Which team sport has won the most national titles at the University Florida? They marvel at their ignorance and laugh at each other’s guesses – and more important, they get the point: Don’t trust your memory. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Life isn’t all fun and games, and neither is teaching. What bothers me most about our educational system is that students have been taught that learning is a game of sorts: memorize details and regurgitate them for a test. I don’t want to play that futile game. Instead, my mission is to enable students to discover their values.
In ethics, for example, I skip the easy “thou shalt nots” and focus instead on genuine dilemmas. Should we name the mother of the first baby of the year at the local hospital because names add to credibility, or do we withhold her identity because she’s an illegal immigrant and may not realize her willingness to be pictured could increase the likelihood she will get deported? How do you decide such a dilemma when there are no clear rules and competing interests are at stake?
On the first day of class, I ask ethics students to complete an autobiographical index card about their journalistic interests. I also slip in two questions that hint at the real task before them. How do you define “good”? What is the meaning of life?
I feed back some of their answers (anonymously) during the course while helping them see ethical dilemmas in terms of their own value system. Are they more comfortable with following rules and principles than deciding what to do on a case-by-case basis? Would they prefer to calculate the greater good among competing interests or be able to reference guidelines and policies? Is consistency more important than results? Do the ends justify the means?
This exploration of values translates most easily to the ethics course I teach, but applies to something as mundane as editing, which primarily involves the re-acquisition of grammar, concision and math skills students forgot or find irrelevant in a text-and-Twitter world. But editing is also about values: selecting words to describe people and deciding which details are in the first sentence. Journalists think that we capture facts drifting in the ether and recast them in neutral tones. An editing course can challenge that passivity myth to help students see the values inherent in, for example, declaring that the local school board member “refused” instead of “declined” to comment.
The highest compliment a student can bestow is, “You made me think.” Yes, it’s important that students also see that the course was compelling, which these days requires entertainment (using Pam and Jim from “The Office” to teach proper use of “who” and “whom”), rewards (using those student index cards to hold drawings at the end of lecture classes for small prizes to incent attendance) and a heavy dose of practical utility (the second-day lecture is “Will there be a job for me?”). Today’s students at Enormous State University also expect personal attention, which is why I solicit and attach pictures to those autobiographical index cards to learn names and treat people as individuals. But I don’t want to be known only as a professor who covers relevant topics or learns names. I would rather students tell me that I made them think. And what I want them to think about, even if they never use these words, are their values.
Like all human beings, students want to learn. When I returned to school to get my doctorate after 25 years away from college, it took me awhile to realize that the undergraduates’ carefully cultivated air of academic indifference was a self-defense mechanism. All professors can tell stories about silly student antics. But my teaching improves when I see myself as a partner with the students, working together against the common foe of ignorance. Just as relationships deteriorate when partners point fingers at each other, so do professors suffer when they blame students for not learning. Students want to learn. We just have to help them tap into their innate curiosity, creativity and capabilities.
Even if that means using Legos.
I hoped the dean wouldn’t hear us as the students, in small groups, playfully competed against each other (for a bag of Nerds candies) to fashion something clever from a Ziploc bag of toy building blocks and explicate the meaning. The atmosphere was more befitting a kindergarten classroom than a somber doctoral class. But the tactile exercise worked. When I asked the students why I had them play with blocks, they spent 20 minutes discussing what they had learned. Typologies or moderator-mediator models don’t come with instructions. The students could use only the blocks available, just as researchers are limited to the data they have. And a good model only works if it makes visual sense to others.
Legos may make for unconventional pedagogy, but students of all types and stripes learn by doing and by having fun. At 7:30 a.m., editing lab students would rather snooze than learn fact-checking skills. So I divide them into groups, have them choose a type of punctuation for their team name and compete (this time, for Smarties candies) to see which group can correctly guess at questions such as: Who invented the concept of survival of the fittest? How many Americans have been murdered since Sept. 11? Which team sport has won the most national titles at the University Florida? They marvel at their ignorance and laugh at each other’s guesses – and more important, they get the point: Don’t trust your memory. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Life isn’t all fun and games, and neither is teaching. What bothers me most about our educational system is that students have been taught that learning is a game of sorts: memorize details and regurgitate them for a test. I don’t want to play that futile game. Instead, my mission is to enable students to discover their values.
In ethics, for example, I skip the easy “thou shalt nots” and focus instead on genuine dilemmas. Should we name the mother of the first baby of the year at the local hospital because names add to credibility, or do we withhold her identity because she’s an illegal immigrant and may not realize her willingness to be pictured could increase the likelihood she will get deported? How do you decide such a dilemma when there are no clear rules and competing interests are at stake?
On the first day of class, I ask ethics students to complete an autobiographical index card about their journalistic interests. I also slip in two questions that hint at the real task before them. How do you define “good”? What is the meaning of life?
I feed back some of their answers (anonymously) during the course while helping them see ethical dilemmas in terms of their own value system. Are they more comfortable with following rules and principles than deciding what to do on a case-by-case basis? Would they prefer to calculate the greater good among competing interests or be able to reference guidelines and policies? Is consistency more important than results? Do the ends justify the means?
This exploration of values translates most easily to the ethics course I teach, but applies to something as mundane as editing, which primarily involves the re-acquisition of grammar, concision and math skills students forgot or find irrelevant in a text-and-Twitter world. But editing is also about values: selecting words to describe people and deciding which details are in the first sentence. Journalists think that we capture facts drifting in the ether and recast them in neutral tones. An editing course can challenge that passivity myth to help students see the values inherent in, for example, declaring that the local school board member “refused” instead of “declined” to comment.
The highest compliment a student can bestow is, “You made me think.” Yes, it’s important that students also see that the course was compelling, which these days requires entertainment (using Pam and Jim from “The Office” to teach proper use of “who” and “whom”), rewards (using those student index cards to hold drawings at the end of lecture classes for small prizes to incent attendance) and a heavy dose of practical utility (the second-day lecture is “Will there be a job for me?”). Today’s students at Enormous State University also expect personal attention, which is why I solicit and attach pictures to those autobiographical index cards to learn names and treat people as individuals. But I don’t want to be known only as a professor who covers relevant topics or learns names. I would rather students tell me that I made them think. And what I want them to think about, even if they never use these words, are their values.
Like all human beings, students want to learn. When I returned to school to get my doctorate after 25 years away from college, it took me awhile to realize that the undergraduates’ carefully cultivated air of academic indifference was a self-defense mechanism. All professors can tell stories about silly student antics. But my teaching improves when I see myself as a partner with the students, working together against the common foe of ignorance. Just as relationships deteriorate when partners point fingers at each other, so do professors suffer when they blame students for not learning. Students want to learn. We just have to help them tap into their innate curiosity, creativity and capabilities.
Even if that means using Legos.