teaching
philosophy, 6/99 (revised 6/2001, 7/2004, 1/2010)
Dear Students,
I was filling out a loan application a several years ago, and one of the questions on the application was "how many years of schooling do you have: (a) less than 12 (b) 13-16 (c) more than 16 (specify)". I had to admit to being a registered student in school for a period that spanned 32 years, which is somewhat longer than most of my students have been alive. A good bit of that was as a part-time graduate student. While I was a student, I watched a number of "good" students fail, students who were capable of succeeding, but set their priorities somewhere else or didn't understand what was required for them to succeed.
My view of success is that it requires different things at different stages of life. For students completing the Bachelors degree, it means being able to find (or create) a job in your field, convince people that you are capable, and performing well in that job. For graduate students, it means choosing a topic and a committee, doing work essentially on your own with progressively less guidance, and being able to present and defend the work to a group of knowledgeable and critical peers. I have known several graduate students who sailed through the course work, but when it came time to write a thesis, they never finished, and some never quite got started. For anyone entering the technical workforce, the ability to think critically, to be able to compare and contrast ideas, designs, and solutions, is necessary. This thinking must be at a level of maturity commensurate with the demands of the workforce for which you are preparing. While certain facts and definitions must be memorized, they are merely a prerequisite for learning how to think critically. I find few people can generalize well without examples.
Students and folks outside the academic environment sometimes complain that the academics (me, for example) don’t teach the things the students need to know. This complaint is often accompanied by a litany of things that sound important to the speaker at the time. (My most vivid memory is someone saying, “why don’t you teach them something they need in the real world like how to use Quatro!”) B. F. Skinner said "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." I can't hope to teach you enough for you to remain informed or literate for even a few years. I don't even know what specific technology you will need to know in two years. The only thing I can assure you with certainty is that in the next two years, things will have changed. Thus, my goal in teaching is not for you to understand how to do any particular task such as writing a sorting routine in Fortran (or WATFIV or C++ or Java or PHP or … ). My goal is for you to know enough to go find out on your own how to do what you need to do, regardless of the tool or technology. If I succeed, when the tools you use now are as old and arcane as //JOB EXEC=F4,CLASS=A and Executive Secretary you'll be able to use the tools that are available. I want you to learn how to learn. Most of what I know that's useful to me now I learned outside of the classroom from people who were not trying to teach me the thing I learned.
I remember my first day in high school, in gym class on a hot, sticky, August afternoon in a school in a corn field in the humid Midwest, sixty scrawny kids sitting in awe as some old (he seemed ancient at the time, though 40 is starting to look pretty young, now) PE instructor hung from a chin-up bar and lectured to us in a booming voice, "I … don't expect … you to do … anything … I can't do", in each pause pulling is chest up to the bar and slowly dropping down again, a total of twenty pull-ups while lecturing us, and that was his sixth class of the day. I remember we couldn't do twenty pull-ups. Most of us managed one or two. We couldn't run a mile or do sixty sit-ups either; but by the end of the year, we did all that and more in the first few minutes of class every class.
I think of that each day as I enter the classroom. If Coach Williams had told us that one or two pull-ups and a lap around the track was enough, that's what we would have done, and that's what we would have been doing at the end of the year. The thought of doing twenty pull-ups was inconceivable to us that first day of class, yet every one of us developed that ability over time. I feel obligated to ask you to do things that, while they may seem to you to be impossible, I know that you can do them in time.
I believe that a learner must participate in the learning process. This isn’t particularly profound or new. The research literature is full of interesting work that confirms students recall more from engaging activities than from listening to lectures. In my classes, I work to provide students the opportunities to engage. Over the years (I began teaching undergraduates in 1983), I have found a few principles to guide me.
It is generally not useful to give someone information before they are ready to receive it. When I was a coach, I found that waiting for an athlete to ask for help resulted in much better engagement on the part of the athlete than my offering the same advice unsolicited. Later, I found that I could get a similar level of involvement by priming the athlete, sometimes by asking the simple question, “would you like to perform better?” The athlete would stop, think for a moment, then invariably say, “yes … how?” I hear other faculty members refer to this as a “teachable moment”. In the classroom, I try to create teachable moments by asking leading questions or presenting problems and allowing students to work for a while. When they encounter frustration, the teachable moment arrives, and they are receptive to the topic or technique I want to present. Sometimes what I discover is that they already know the technique, and by allowing them to work first, I can adjust the class and move on without boring them. Sometimes I discover they don’t have sufficient background to appreciate the technique or new material, and I can help them fill in that missing knowledge without wasting the class time trying to teach things for which they are not prepared.
Learning to think, speak well, and listen well takes time and practice for many students. I ask my students to practice good answers to the questions I pose. I want every student to learn to speak well. I don’t let students shout out answers. I don’t allow the two or three students at the front of the room answer all the questions. I move around the class and ask specific students to speak. With classes up to fifty students, each student can expect to speak in class every week. When I ask a student to speak, I patiently wait for an answer. Observers have noted that I wait as long as twenty seconds before prompting the student. Many students come into my class uncomfortable speaking in front of the class. Nearly all are able to answer questions comfortably by the end of the semester.
Active learning is not silent. I often have my students work in small teams of two or three in class. The instructions are that among the members of the team, they are to create and practice a good answer to the question. To do this, they must speak. I make the tasks explicit (answer this question, solve this problem, design this solution, compare these designs), I give them a fixed amount of time, and I look over their shoulders as they work. I use cooperative learning techniques to physically arrange the groups and to work on team skills. I have them practice paraphrasing each other and verifying the paraphrase, which forces them to listen to each other when they discuss. I know that the class is being successful when I tell them to start and I have to close the doors to the room to keep from disrupting classes down the hall.
Not everyone comes to class with the skill to work effectively on a team. I actually take time to teach student how to hold a discussion, how to reach consensus, how to hold a team meeting, how to provide constructive feedback, and how to resolve conflicts. A persistent complaint of students coming into my class is that one or two team members do all the work and have to share the credit. In my classes, I try to establish cooperative teams. One significant aspect of cooperative teams is individual accountability. I ask specific students when we report on the in-class assignments. I try to engage every student in class.
One of the tricks to success is hard work. When I took calculus, I asked Mr. Flora how I could learn to do the integrations. He simply said, “Practice.” As an undergraduate, I was sitting in the department office waiting for a signature on some obscure piece of paper destined for some obscure file cabinet in some building devoted to administration. I overheard two professors, one of whom I'm sure was describing me when he said, "he just doesn't know what hard work is yet." Now, years later, I am caught trying to convince students that they can work hard, they can achieve these impossible dreams, but that it really does take hard work. (Think for a moment how you would describe the color green to someone who has been blind since birth.) I don't know how to tell you about hard work. If you think you know, you might know, or you might be wrong. A number of my students work hard already. They have jobs. They have families. They take lots of classes. Hard work must also be focused on the right things, which are frequently the most frustrating.
The trend in the past decade or so has been to ask the question, “How do you know your students are learning?” I have a responsibility to recruiters, my employers, accreditation boards, and the state to assess my students and assign grades. Here are a couple of things I consider when I assign grades.
Years ago I was climbing a mountain and this particular mountain is renowned for its brutal weather. Before I attempted the summit, I met a great mountaineer who told me, "It doesn't matter how long or how hard you trained, how much you paid, or how good you are. The mountain doesn't owe you the summit. If you're lucky and the storms clear and there aren't avalanches and you’re healthy and you have a healthy partner and you persevere, you might make it, but you never deserve it." (Jim Detterline, 1993)
Suppose you had a brain tumor and required surgery to live more than a week. There are two doctors in town: one studied thousands of hours, pouring over the books, the homework, the lab, the operating room, gave every ounce of effort he had, but could not hold the scalpel steady; the other doctor skipped classes and played golf on Wednesdays, but had done exactly this kind of surgery successfully a hundred times last year. Your chance of surviving with the first doctor is slim. Your chance of surviving with the second doctor is very good. Which doctor would you choose?
I am not able to reliably quantify how much you worked, how much you know, or how much you learned. The simple but painful fact is that how hard you work is not the basis upon which grades are given. How much you know is not the basis upon which grades are given. Grades will be given on your demonstration of mastery of the material presented: Exams. Homework. Projects. You must demonstrate that you know enough of the material that we (the department, the accrediting bodies, the international organizations that help establish curricula, and the industrial advisory boards) decided you had to know in order to pass. (Be warned, the level of effort is a pretty good predictor of student success. The harder you work, the greater you probability of success. The mountaineer who trains is more likely to reach the summit. But the measure will be your demonstration of mastery.) I can't give you a grade. I can't change your grade just because you worked hard. I can't let you do extra projects and pass my class after the fact. In order to succeed in my classes, you must clear the bar, and the height of that bar is set by the expectations of my employers and my department. Please, please, please, figure out how to demonstrate that you have mastered the material before the end of the course. I will help you. Honest. I like watching students succeed.
Assessment of my students is one mode of assessing my own performance. I try to engage a number of measures. If I want to know that students are able to work in teams together, I have them report on each other’s contributions to the team. When I want to know if they can present technical results, I have them give presentations. I bring in a panel to help me assess the presentations. If I want to assess whether they can answer technical questions, I have the panel ask them questions and observe the answers. If I want to know what part of my class they find useful after they have graduated, I ask the alumni and the recruiters. I ask my students what works for them and what does not. My courses and my teaching have evolved.
One day at the end of a particularly long and difficult semester, I asked the teaching assistant for the course if she would be willing to TA for me again the next year. She said, “Yes, I want to. I think if we change a few things we can get it right next time.” Every day when I walk into class I have that same hopeful feeling. If I just get a little better today, I’ll get it right this time. I am constantly trying to learn from my students.
Summary:
- I don't expect you to be
able to do every task, understand every statement, or solve every problem
immediately. Like muscles, your mind grows with practice.
- I won't give you every answer, and I won't even show
you every path to an answer. Part of what you should learn as an undergraduate
is how to discover those paths on your own. Part of what you learn as a
graduate student is how to discover the questions on your own.
- I try to assign grades on the basis of your
demonstration of ability, not on your level of effort. I try to assign
grades fairly, and I frequently seek advice on the grade assignments.
- I expect you to learn how to learn.
- I expect you to learn how to work hard, even if it
takes time, even if it seems painful.
- I expect you to tell me when you don't understand.
- I expect you to read outside of class, practice more
problems than I assign, and learn to speak the language of our field at a
level commensurate with your academic maturity.
- I expect you to learn how to take advantage of the
opportunities and resources available.
- I expect you to participate in your education. You will
not learn by osmosis.