(ESSAY 340) In two weeks, I will finish my 54th year as a college teacher. My 70 students have, so far this semester, done incredibly well. I’m proud of their efforts and how much they want to learn. I’m pleased by their ambition and their willingness to keep working on complex materials day after day.
After 54 years, I surely must have learned something about teaching. Every few years, I try to figure out what I know now that I didn’t understand back in August of 1971 when I stepped into my first classroom and said, “Hello my name is Joe Hoyle and I’m here to help you learn.”
As I have said previously on this blog, I love lists. So I created a countdown of the twelve most important things (in my own mind) that I have learned about college teaching during more than five decades on the job. (The original list was supposed to be ten, but I couldn’t cut it down that far.) If you ask me tomorrow, I might give you a different list, but these are the items that strike me as essential right now.
(12)—The way you test is the way your students will learn. If you tell them you want to help them develop their critical thinking skills and then you test their memorization, you should not be surprised when they put all their focus on memorization.
(11)—Be willing to market your class to your students. Here’s a good message, “This is important stuff, and it will be fun, and you can be successful.” If you don’t believe that, you need to redesign your course. Assuming you do believe it, you occasionally need to explain to your students the primary benefits of what they are learning. During any semester, I will ask my students to do a considerable amount of hard work. They will naturally be resistant unless I help them understand how the resulting knowledge is going to affect their lives in a positive way. “Learn it because I said so,” is not likely to inspire the best from any college student. They deserve to know why you think the assignments in your class are important.
(10)—Every class session should be important. I believe college education must be transformative. I want to create a significant piece of that transformation every day. By the time they make it through middle school and high school and arrive at my class, many students have suffered through a lot of what I refer to as “trivial education,” education that has no joy and no apparent purpose. I’m not paid to do that. I want every student to walk out of every class thinking that their time has been well spent.
(9)—On the first day of every semester, I explain to my students that I define the grade of A as “excellent.” I don’t believe teachers are doing students a favor by giving them an A for lesser work. College students are not naïve. They know the difference between excellent and good. They might love getting an A without much effort, but the thrill of that success will be tainted.
(8)—Procrastination is a mighty foe. Students are human beings, and human beings are not always great at self-motivation. As a student once told me, “I have a busy life. If your assignment is not on fire, I have other things that need to be done.” To help students achieve serious accomplishments, the teacher should provide a bit of urgency now and then as motivation so they can overcome their natural procrastination. A teacher’s common announcement, “Pay attention because this will be on the test,” is nothing more than a trite method to create urgency in the heads of the students. Surely, there are better ways to give them the push they need. I add that urgency by using the Socratic Method and then cold calling on every student every day. That style fits my personality. Every teacher should consider how they can best bring a little urgency into their class to help students get beyond procrastination. Find a method that works for you because your students are not robots. They are human beings.
(7)—I work to know every student as a person and then make sure they understand that I know them. Many students feel invisible sitting in a class and that has a detrimental effect on their interest in attaining a quality education. I call on them every day by name and often email them when they are absent. I try to instill in each person a confidence that success is possible no matter what their previous experiences have been. “I know this is a complicated subject, but you are bright and if you work hard, you can do well even if you don’t make an A. I’m here to help. Let’s make something good happen.”
(6)—A great marriage and a great class are both based on open and clear communications. Students cannot read the teacher’s mind. You should think about what they need to consider to be successful and then convey that information very clearly. Over the course of a semester, I probably email my students 100 times. Most messages are short and all should be to the point. I frequently start the correspondence with, “Here’s something you should think about as you get ready for tomorrow’s class” or “Here’s something you should have noted in this morning’s class.” We all want our students to be successful. If I can make the topic more interesting or if I can help the students avoid some type of educational pitfall, why not tell them?
(5)—Talk less. I suspect that 100 percent of college teachers talk too much in class. People don’t like silence and, if students are not inclined to speak, the teacher often gets anxious and starts filling in that silence. And, students are usually glad to let the teacher do all the work. There are many ways to push students to be active. Find the strategy that works best for you. I pose questions, sometimes odd or unique questions. I try to say as little as possible. I want the students to do the talking and thinking and work out the answer. Occasionally, if a student responds to one of my questions with a question, my comment will be, “I’m paid enough to ask questions. I’m not paid enough to provide answers. Right or wrong, I expect you to provide the answers.” For college students, I think that is appropriate. The practice of working through a problem to arrive at their own answer is an excellent way for students to achieve understanding.
(4)—Having clear and reasonable goals is essential. Whenever I talk with new teachers, the first and last questions I stress are: What do you want your last class of the semester to look like and feel like? What kind of transformation are you trying to create? Identify the specifics of that vision and keep them in mind whenever you make decisions on what to cover or what to test or what to do in the next class or how to respond to a student plea. Your vision for the final class of the semester is your guiding star. Consider what the most efficient way is to achieve that goal. Set clear goals and set them high. Then work as hard as you can to get every student to achieve those goals.
(3)—Every class session works better if students spend an appropriate amount of time in preparation. Nothing ever works well if students arrive without being prepared. Students who are well prepared can create miracles in class. Students who are not prepared become stenographers. How do you encourage students to do the work necessary to be properly prepared when they walk into class every day? If you can solve this challenge, you have the chance to become a truly outstanding teacher. I provide complicated questions in advance and then tell them, “I’m going to call on you and I want legitimate answers so be prepared.” Does it work? For me, yes, some of the time.
(2)—I have long believed that the most underutilized time in a student’s education comes during the 24-48 hours after class. Proper understanding does not occur until class coverage is organized and solidified and that needs to happen as soon as possible after the student leaves class. After many, if not most, of my classes, I email my students a 15–30-minute practice assignment with the instructions, “This question covers what we did in class today but is probably 10 percent harder just to stretch your knowledge. I have included the answer I think is best. If you can’t get to my answer, bring your work and swing by my office and I’ll give you a push.” If I had to provide one practical teaching recommendation, it would be some type of assignment immediately after class. Once I started doing that on a regular basis, I felt that the quality of the learning went up dramatically. (The second chapter of the wonderful book Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel is titled, “To Learn, Retrieve.” These practice assignments come in part from that chapter.)
(1)—I did a TEDx talk back in November about the power of transformative education. For me, the underlying theme was the importance of creating genuine trust between teacher and students. The teacher asks the students to do a lot of work with only the mere possibility that this work will lead to a deeper understanding of the subject matter and, hopefully, to a good grade. For this working relationship to be successful, the two parties must trust each other. I firmly believe that the teacher must do everything possible to create the mutual respect that leads to a personal level of trust. Without trust between teacher and student, the quality of the education is severely limited.
Those are 12 things I’ve learned over the past 54 years.
If you think there is something that I forgot to include, put it in the comments below.
In case you are interested in watching my 12 minute TEDxYouth@RVA talk about transformative education, here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G20tup61ZxI&t=1s
And, my book, Transformative Education, is available as a free download at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/375/
If all of that is not enough, you can also go to the following link and watch a video where I tell four stories about teaching in college.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT428yjJ0Ls
