Fresh off receiving the 2013 Desire2Learn Innovation Award for Teaching and Learning, Carleton history professor Shawn Graham tells us how he manages to keep his teaching creative.
By: Shawn Graham
I’ve had some spectacular fails in my teaching practice. When I first started out, I would look around at what other folks were doing and decide, ‘yes – that’s the thing! I’ll do that!’ More often than not, it would crash and burn. But why? It worked for so-and-so; I just must not be doing it right. Or maybe it depends on the particular dynamics of the group. Or maybe it was the year.
So back I’d go to the well, draw another draught of wisdom, and try again. Sometimes it’d work; sometimes not. What made the difference? Was it the particular well I was drawing from? I do read some of the scholarship on teaching and learning in higher education. I follow a lot of folks on Twitter. I’ve been in a lot of classrooms. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, some excellent teachers over the last several years. Nope, probably not the well.
As the cliché goes, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ If I’ve learned anything about being creative in the classroom, it could be summed up in two words: “be authentic”. When things have gone wrong for me, it’s because what I was trying to do was not authentic – either to myself or to the situation.
For instance, I blog a lot. I find a lot of value in sharing my thoughts, my works in progress, my wins and my fails with a broader community. Blogging as part of the coursework in my classes should therefore be ‘authentic’, right? As it happens, no, not really. Most of my students, if they think about blogging at all, regard it as rather passé; they don’t do it, and asking them to do it as part of the coursework just becomes another hoop to jump through.
The first time I tried it in a class at the university level – asking students to blog about readings – it quickly became a rote activity with no added value, a way of ticking off the ‘participation’ box. After some reflection, I realized that for this to be an authentic activity for the students, it had to reconnect to what was going on in the classroom and to their other assignments and to the other students. It had to become integral to the learning, not a bolted-on afterthought.
Drawing on the teaching practice of Mark Sample (now at George Mason University, but shortly moving to Davidson College), I assigned different weekly groups of students to respond to the readings on the course blog, prior to the week’s sessions. Another group of students would then present the first group’s posts to the class, to kick-off discussion and a third group would then draw out the interesting elements of the discussion in final cap-stone blog posts. You can read the course blog at 3812.graeworks.net.
The exercise was successful I think for a number of reasons, but what fostered the most creativity in class and out was the way the activity required each group to be a pillar for the next group’s work. It was that ‘integrity’ that made the blogging so much more authentic this time around. True creativity lies in dealing with constraints and identifying authentic tasks is one such constraint.