He Said (Joe Lipsett)
Recently, I’ve led some Teaching Talks with teaching assistants on the value of reflecting about teaching. It’s a topic that’s close to my heart because it requires me to re-evaluate my approach to teaching, including the way I interact with and engage students, and how my teaching philosophy has changed over the years.
I told the teaching assistants that I’m a very different teacher than I was when I began teaching five years ago. I remember over-researching my first class to the point that I packed 60 slides into my 45-minute lectures because I had so much information that I needed to share with my students. It never occurred to me that they would be unable to process so much content because I anticipated that they would be just as excited to learn about the subject as I was to teach it!
Over the years, I’ve come to realize how important it is to involve my students in these discussions. In those early courses I made all the decisions, from what we would study to how the course was laid out to when they would submit assignments and how. I recognize now that students need (and often want) parameters to help them structure the course, but that they like to have a say in their own learning. For some courses that simply means contributing to guidelines that everyone agrees to abide by; for other classes that means selecting which week they’ll submit reading responses or how they want to organize their presentation to their peers. It’s a delicate balance that incorporates their needs as learners with the outcomes I know that they need to meet by the end of our 12 weeks together.
In reflecting on my teaching for this TA session, I realized that the most valuable lesson I learned was this transition from teacher-oriented courses to student/learner-centered teaching. My students may be young, but they always bring something to class. My job is not to teach them certain content (though that certainly happens); no, rather my job is to help facilitate their learning and ensure that they leave my course with the four to six outcomes I’ve prioritized for them. At the end of the day, whether they can remember all of the minute details we discussed or they read is immaterial. I’d rather my students feel that our class was an equal partnership with a few fixed outcomes that they can address or perform years down the road.
That’s my most valuable teaching “life lesson.” Samah, what have you learned from your years of teaching experience?
She Said (Samah Sabra)
My teaching has also changed a lot over the last five years. As in Joe’s case, this has meant a shift from a content-heavy to a skills-based focus when I redesign a course and plan lectures. One of the biggest lessons I learned, however, is to recognize the importance of providing students with a bit more structure to help direct their learning.
My first teaching experience came with a lot of excitement and nervousness. I was so worried about making sure I got through the material – and that meant a lot of material – that I went into each class with pages and pages of notes that were supposed to guide me through each lecture. I inserted questions here and there, but I was a talking head in many ways. That first year, I thought I could just go in, give students a bunch of information and expect them to know what to do with it.
I quickly realized how unfair this was because, given a lot of information and no direction or structure for learning, students assumed I expected them to memorize and summarize the material I presented. What I wanted them to do with that material, but had not made clear, was to take the big structuring concept, internalize it and apply it in a different context. I gave them no indication of this, however, and at the end of the year had produced a group of students who could (and did) memorize and reproduce definitions and the key tenets of various theoretical perspectives I presented on. It wasn’t until they submitted their first assignment – where they were expected to use those theoretical precepts to analyze a new piece of text – that I quickly realized that something was not right. This was my first introduction to the importance of constructive alignment in course design, and the mistakes I made that year taught me important lessons.
What I do differently now can be summarized in three sentences. First, I make sure that I have clear learning outcomes and that I make these explicit to students. Second, I now use assessments that allow students to demonstrate that they have met these outcomes. Third, and perhaps most importantly in terms of how I structure the day-to-day classes with students, I include various opportunities for students to practice the skills I want them to learn. This means I have in-class teaching and learning activities that allow them to develop those skills. These activities help me provide structure for their learning while making me less and less of a talking head at the front of the room.
The EDC can help you discover a variety of concepts that are critical to designing a course. We are offering a three-part hands-on workshop that will address four aspects of course design, starting with conducting student needs assessments and designing learning outcomes, followed by aligning assessments to learning outcomes and finally aligning teaching methods to outcomes.
The three-part workshops run from 1-3 p.m. on Nov. 14, 21 and 28 in room 422 Dunton Tower. Participants are encouraged to attend all three sessions in order to get a full understanding of the course design framework. However, you can also register for the individual workshops.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at 613-520-2600 ext. 4433, edc@carleton.ca.