As I wind down my graduate career (though part of me still does not believe it is happening), I am exploring possibilities for my future. One of my recent new professional interests is reading about teaching at the college level. In one of the random twists of fate in my graduate career I was paid to not teach. While I am truly grateful for having had that boon, there is the negative consequence that I am rather lacking in the teaching experience department. Acknowledging this weakness, I’ve set out to at least build up my knowledge of teaching.
My first stop, and the event that triggered this urge, was when I received an ad from Left Coast Press in the mail. There were a lot of interesting titles, but what got my attention was The Art and Craft of College Teaching. I’m trying to find a copy of that book for cheap (or free) but even half.com copies a little on the pricey side for someone with no job. I expanded my horizons on Amazon, looking for other books on college teaching. I settled on What the Best College Teachers Do because it has good reviews and it was very affordable. I’m around three-fourths of the way through this book and I’ve been feeling very inspired by it. The core lesson the book has to offer is that teachers should have some degree of empathy for the learning process of the student. People learn best in a safe (or natural as the book terms it) learning environment where the interestingness and relevance of the subject matter is made clear. The book has several examples of accomplishing these goals while teaching physics or chemistry. I think that for anthropology it would be easy to upgrade the course material to reach these criteria. Anthropology is about all of us!
Looking towards other books, the public library once again proved to be a plentiful fountain of free information. While I have objections to the title and sometimes shoddy execution of the series, I checked out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Teaching College. I’ve only read the first few pages but it seems like both books share a lot of common advice, which is reassuring.
Sometimes probability works in mysterious ways. Well, actually it doesn’t: the gist is that unlikely things happen occasionally, but what the poor introduction to this paragraph is trying to say is that a third source of knowledge on teaching literally fell in my lap yesterday. For some reason I got the previous issue of American Scientist in the mail, even though I already got the issue after it, and saw an article about college teaching! The article is simply called “Learning and Teaching Strategies” and you can read it here. I especially like how in some sections the co-authors openly disagreed in teaching philosophy but it’s totally cool because there is more than one good way to teach (the article does hit on many of the same points as the two books).
This sudden immersion into the teaching literature has my mind running wild with how to teach an anthropology class. I’ll end with one idea that popped in my head when I was in my meditation vault, a.k.a my bathroom. What the Best… mentions the importance of the ability for students to ask questions. The ineffectiveness of memorization/regurgitation quizzes and exams was another issue that was mentioned. But how to address these two problems? The grade has to be based on something, but how to you test for asking questions instead of answering them? Well, how about, instead of pop quizzes, I give pop unquizzes? Instead of asking them for answers to questions based on the previous lecture, how about I ask them to ask me a question about the previous lecture? The pop unquiz would fulfill several tasks for me and the student. For me I have something to grade based on analytical thought (I’ll be gentle at first), and bonus, a measure of attendance of the previous lecture (they have to know what happened last time) and the current one (they have to be here to take the unquiz). The student gets to do some thinking about the subject matter, perhaps even paying more attention in class so they can ask a really good question. I think the unquiz has a lot of potential as a teaching tool and I can’t wait to test it out.
One day.
The bathroom? LOL. I did the unquiz a bit in my SI Sessions. Probably nothing to the extent you are thinking of, but it went over really well. Its also kind of akin to the midterm/final study Jeopardy game i set up. I found the question technique to be a useful way to psychologically organize and retain information for the students (and judge how well I myself was doing with explaining the subject matter!).