Remembering to Breathe

I found myself nodding in recognition as I read Aimée Morrison’s article in which she described how she used to teach:

When I began teaching, and for some time after, I used to try to assuage...anxieties [about not succeeding at the hard job of teaching well] by crowding them out with activity. I would prepare 15 pages of lecture notes for an 80-minute class session. I would assign 70 pages of reading for every class meeting so we wouldn’t run out of material. I would cover over any pauses in the discussion with more lecturing, more PowerPoints, more handouts. I had students write research papers and exams and bibliographies and presentations and blog posts and quizzes — just so that it would be clear that I had a plan, and I was in charge, and I was well-prepared, and I knew what I was doing.

Morrison’s article uses yoga as a metaphor, explaining how we often try so hard to teach well --the yoga term is “over-efforting”--that we forget to breathe as we go along. She makes a plea for more breathing space for both teacher and student, more time in which students can learn.  She argues for being “less busy but more mindful” in our teaching, so that our classes can be more student-centered and our students more interested and more active, covering less perhaps but learning what is covered in more depth.

That makes sense to me even if it goes against the grain of my built-in need to be 110% prepared for what will happen each moment of each class and each class of the semester.  But it seems like an appropriate note on which to end my final Teaching Matters blog. As I enter retirement and work on breathing deeply and evenly--on some nice tropical beach if there is any justice in this universe--I will be thinking of you all, comforted in the knowledge that Lincoln students are flourishing in your capable and caring hands.

Getting Engaged

The premise of Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers by Alison James and Stephen D. Brookfield, one of the new CETL books available in the library, is that reflective thinking is essential for learning, and engagement is essential for reflection.

The authors begin with “Three Axioms of Student Engagement” (pp. 6-7):

1. Student learning is deepest when the content or skills being learned are personally meaningful, and this happens when students see connections and applications of learning. 
2. Student learning “sticks” more when the same content or skills are learned through multiple methods.
3. The most memorable critical incidents students experience in their learning are those when they are required to “come at” their learning in a new way, when they are “jerked out” of the humdrum by some unexpected challenge or unanticipated task.  We naturally remember the surprising rather that the routine, the unpredictable rather than the expected.

The rest of the book explains why and how to get students involved in the following 14 reflection-encouraging activities:

• Check the assumptions that inform their actions and judgments;
• Seek to open themselves to new and unfamiliar perspectives;
• Attempt intersubjective understanding and perspective taking—trying to understand how another person reasons, understands content, or views knowledge;
• Make their intuitions and “gut” feelings the focus of study;
• Study the effects of their actions with a view to changing them;
• Look for blind spots and omissions in their thinking;
• Identify what is justified and well grounded in their thinking;
• Accept and experiment with multiple learning modalities;
• Value emotional dimensions of their learning as much as the purely cognitive;
• Try to upend their  habitual ways of understanding something;
• Connect their thinking conducted in one domain to thinking in another;
• Become more aware of their habitual epistematic cognition—the typical ways they judge something to be true;
• Apply reflective protocols in contextually appropriate ways;
• Alternate cognitive analysis with an acceptance of an unregulated, unmediated flow of emotions, impulses, intuitions, and images.

What sorts of activities have you tried to encourage student reflection and engage them in multiple ways of knowing your subject matter?  Any creative teaching tips to share?

Putting the S in the SLO

A recent thread on a faculty development listserv I belong to has been focusing on how to maximize the learning potential in those SLOs we all dutifully write, discuss the first day of class, and then often don’t think much about again until the end of the semester. Some discussion has centered on how to make SLOs more meaningful to students.  The following, quoted with permission, is from Mary Goldschmidt, Faculty Development Specialist at the University of Scranton:

“Inviting my students to set their own goals as a formal part of the course is something I’ve been doing for 5 years now – in composition courses as well as gen ed courses in literature (not something students are usually too keen to take). It’s a practice strongly supported by the scholarship on self-regulated learning and goal orientation.…To illustrate what these look like, here are a few of my students’ self-defined learning outcomes (paraphrased):

• an electrical engineering major said that he wants to become better at listening to the perspectives of his other small group members because he knows that professionally, he will always be working in teams.
• an occupational therapy major said that she wants to increase her ability to pay attention to detail when reading literature because she can see a parallel between this kind of reading and “reading” her clients, e.g., noticing what’s not always explicit.
• an economics major explained that his father loves poetry and he simply wants to be able to talk more with his Dad about poetry."

Goldsmith goes on to point out that it’s not enough just to do this once on the first day of class; student engagement has to be sustained.  “Twice later in the semester, I ask students to write reflections on the actions they’re taking to work toward their goals, the progress they’re making, and what new or different things they might do to better achieve their goals. I also ask them how I can best support them in their learning.  Students are significantly more engaged in the course when they have their own intrinsic motivation for doing well – beyond just wanting a good grade.”

Have you tried anything similar with your students?  How has it worked?