As
I try to mention every now and then, if you want me to send you an announcement whenever
I post a new blog entry (about 20 times per year), send me an email at Jhoyle@richmond.edu.
***
My
good friend Bob Jensen passed along the following URL a week or so ago:
The
related story talks with one of the authors of the book Taking College Teaching Seriously:
Pedagogy Matters! The story begins with an interesting
assertion: “The call to increase the
number of U.S. adults with college degrees and improve college completion rates
across the country has only grown louder in recent years. But relatively little has been discussed
about the actual teaching that occurs inside the thousands of lecture halls,
labs and classrooms on college campuses.”
Do
you agree or disagree with that statement?
I think that very assertion is worth a discussion. My tendency is to mostly agree with the
statement based on what I have seen as I go out and about. But there are some wonderful exceptions. For that reason, I found the comments at the
end of this story almost as interesting as the story itself. In colleges, do we discuss teaching a
little, a lot, none, or what? What do
you think?
Thanks
to Bob for sending that along.
***
As
I have mentioned previously, I led a couple of teaching programs here at the
University of Richmond recently. In the
most recent, I began with one of my all-time favorite quotes about teaching (a
quote that I have mentioned in this blog a number of times over the
years):
“Great
teaching is not about the number of years you do it. Great teaching is about the amount of time
you spend thinking about it.”
Whenever
I bring up this sentiment, I get very little resistance. It has a common sense appeal that people
like. But, never once, over all these
years that I have been doing this, has anyone ever raised his or her hand and
asked the perfectly obvious question: “So,
what do you think about when you are thinking about teaching?” If “thinking about it” is so darn important,
shouldn’t someone address the issue of what thoughts we should be
pondering? Do we get hung up admiring
quotations or do we actually consider their implications?
I
raised that very question in my presentation.
And, then I told a story about one of the things I think about as I
consider how I want to teach my classes.
When my older son was a senior in high school, he did extremely well in
his art classes and decided that he might want to attend the Rhode Island
School of Design (RISD). Over my winter
break that year, we scheduled a trip to Providence, Rhode Island, to tour the
campus. As luck would have it, the area
was recovering from a huge snow and ice storm.
On Friday, January 7, 1994, we were spending our last day on the campus before
heading home the next morning. As we
walked across campus in the snow and ice, we saw announcements that the
students were putting on a presentation of videos that had been made in some of
their classes. It sounded fascinating so we came back to
campus that evening for the show.
Because of the bad weather, we arrived early and wandered around in one of
the classroom buildings to kill time. In a computer
lab on the basement level, we found a young student working at a computer
monitor. We asked her what she was
working on and she was ever so enthusiastic to show us. Okay, this is nearly 22 years ago when computer programming was primitive. She
had been working on designing a stick figure on her monitor that could toss a
ball and then catch it. And, sure
enough, as we watched, the stick figure did exactly that. The
student was so thrilled. She told us
all about how hard she had worked that entire day and how exciting the whole
process had been. Her enthusiasm for the exercise was
contagious.
As
my son and I walked from the room, I turned to him and asked the question: “I
wonder how many of my accounting students work this hard on their Friday
evenings?”
To
which my son replied, “Better still. How
many of your students get that excited about learning accounting?”
We
both laughed but I have thought about that conversation for over two decades
now. How can I get my students so
interested in financial accounting that they will gladly work on Friday evenings
and be ecstatic when they finally manage to solve the assigned problem?
It
is very easy for me to rationalize and say “well, she was doing computer
programming and I’m teaching accounting” but is coming to understand the
essence of financial reporting truly more boring than getting a stick figure to
throw a ball? Or, do I just assume that
my students will think it is boring and, therefore, I accept that as
inevitable?
Since
January 7, 1994, I have spent a lot of time thinking of ways to make my
coverage interesting/engaging/intriguing.
As far as I’m concerned, it should be a pleasure to learn how the world
of accounting works and not drudgery.
What
have I learned from all this thinking?
There are lots and lots of things I could bring up but if I had to list just
one thing, it would be this: Excitement
in education is all about the questions.
The questions you ask your students (in class and on tests) have to be
interesting. They have to be
challenging. They have to be worth the
effort. They have to be puzzling. Focus on the questions.
If
all you do is provide some type of rule or fact or process and
then ask the students to memorize it, no student is ever going to be excited
about your class. Think about the
questions. What questions can you throw
at them that will make students stop and wonder? What questions can you ask that will puzzle
them enough so that they will truly want to work out the answer for
themselves.
That
has been on my mind now for an awfully long period of time.
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