I went to a workshop a few years ago that focused on microteaching as a way to become a better teacher. In microteaching, a group of colleagues takes turns teaching each other something for about five minutes, then they talk about how it worked. I still vividly recall the sense I had through the process of remembering what it was like to be a student and how much that changed how I saw myself as a teacher. I’ve had aha! moments like this during my IF class, and I think many of the students have, too, moments that really cause us to what education is and the way it works in a different way.
Thursday I went meta in class in a way I haven’t since they started doing their IF discussions. We talked about student-centered learning and Friere, and my desire in planning the course to think about how literature relates to our lives as community members and citizens. What students said in response captured succinctly my own feelings about the course. A senior spoke animatedly about how stimulating she finds the class and the way it asks her to engage with ideas and apply them to her life. A first-year student expressed her frustration at the open-endedness of the discussions and how they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Another senior said she appreciated all the different viewpoints her group members brought to the discussions and their openness in sharing them. An English major couldn’t understand why their wasn’t more reading required for the course. A junior said she didn’t feel like she had enough expertise to address the questions I was asking them to answer–what does it mean to be American and what can we do to make the country better?
I really resonated with Sue’s and Keally’s comments about giving students space to explore an issue broadly and deeply. I think students feel that space in this class in a way most of them have never experienced before, and I’m glad for that. I had a cornball moment last week as I listened to the students’ discussions and thought how lucky they were to be talking to each other like that in a world where learning is becoming increasingly Phoenix-ed and Kaplan-ized. When I think about the facilitation skills I want them to take from the class, what springs to mind is just the process of having been in and helped facilitate groups where they help each other unpack ideas and deal with difference without having large white man (I can’t help who I am) authority figure butting in to tell them how to do it right. I’ve seen shy students stand up and run their groups; I’ve talked with dominating students about how good facilitators don’t just lead but make space for others to create; I talked Tuesday with a student who told me she wasn’t cut out to facilitate a discussion, and I could tell her she was dead wrong because I’d just seen her do it.
The caveat still comes with the “deeply” part, the old content/process issue Laura recently wrote about. My biggest mistake in designing the course was asking them to talk too much about things they didn’t know enough about. For me reading Glengarry, Glen Ross, or Pynchon’s “Entropy” leads naturally to a discussion of public policy in America, but it doesn’t to them. That’s the biggest thing I need to work on in moving forward with IF classes–building in ways to strengthen and deepen the connections between what they read and do research on and what they discuss.
3 Comments
Matt, Sounds like setting aside some time for students to debrief about the process and engage in some self-reflection could be a regular feature of your future classes! Although it’s generally a good idea for students to get right into some content, I think it always helps to involve them as co-participants in thinking through why you’re doing things the way you are–especially when it’s a fairly unusual approach. Just wondering: with your self-doubting student, did you point out to her that you had just witnessed her succeeding at facilitating a discussion? I think you’re going to have a lot of lessons-learned from this class.–Jeff
I think that in your role as observer you have an opportunity to help students see their expertise, as well as to help them to better identify what they don’t know– we often hear that it is in understanding what we don’t know that makes us wise, but I think that this concept is largely lost on newcomers to more advanced reflection. Your last paragraph neatly articulates the real challenge with content: we don’t want to put students under a deluge of ideas; instead, we want them to identify the Big Connections/insights. It is crucial that the instructor engage what s/he hears the students saying/struggling with so as to build upon where they are. They will see the value of the process the better you effect that role.
Hi Matt, I enjoyed reading your post. I also found that going meta was really important for me and my students. Sometimes I think I was too meta (given that I’m in communication studies), but even then I ended up shuffling my schedule by a day so we could really talk about the process, what we were learning, where it was going, etc. You’ve got great insights here. Hope the semester wraps up for you well.