I was riding with a former student—now a colleague—and we were discussing our approaches to teaching. She has taken many classes from me over her career, probably more than anyone else has. She knows my teaching as well as anyone outside myself does. She told me (don’t hold me to exact quotes—I’m approximating) “Your classes always look unplanned, as though the things that happen are almost accidental.”
I said “Remember the day you realized my teaching had lots of planning involved, and you hadn’t noticed before, and you said you almost felt tricked? That it wasn’t magic after all?”
She nodded, agreeing and reliving the memory. We went on to talk about how we teach by leading, by drawing out, which led me to talk about why my teaching rarely involves lecturing. She said “You should write what you do, so teachers can use it.”
The truth is that what I do is pretty easy to describe and doesn’t involve magic at all. I teach to please myself.
I’m a curious guy. I like to learn things. One of my interests is in people. So I teach to learn things and to learn people. I teach with a single goal for each class, modified to adjust for the course title. The goal is independent power; the class purpose is motion toward achieving that independent power. For example, in a course entitled “Writing Creative Nonfiction” my goal is moving students toward independent power as writers of creative nonfiction.
My daily plan, then, is always built on holding the one goal in mind. After the first day of class, I think about where the class is based on what I saw in the last meeting (and after that I think of all the previous meetings), and think of something to do to move that class at that time further toward the goal.
My Plan: know the goal, start, assess, re-start.
Simple.
Over the years I’ve reached an accumulation of experience that helps me predict where students are likely to be at any given point in a term—at least, if I’ve taught the class before—so larger developments I can build into my thinking about the next day’s class. The developments on any given day aren’t so predictable, however.
I rarely lecture, and here is where my teaching looks unplanned. The reason I rarely lecture is that I’m a curious guy. Lecturing is me talking about what I’ve already learned. That’s boring to me unless I’m doing it as a response. If a student says or asks something that prompts me to talk about things I know, that’s a social interaction. That’s getting to know the student by establishing the back and forth of conversation. That’s working together. The frontal speech, the lecture from the podium, is too canned and too distant for me to enjoy.
I want to enjoy my teaching. That happens when I’m learning from student thinking, student writing. So I set up classes to draw students out. I offer pertinent discussion prompts and then pay attention to what they say. I can’t know what they’ll say before they say it, and that is where one element of surprise, of unpredictability, that my former student spoke of comes from. This requires serious listening, but that comes easily because I am, after all, interested. Curiosity is a greater strength than already acquired knowledge.
Writing assignments in my courses are also designed to draw students out. This means they sound vague to the uninitiated who expect specific topics, formats, page lengths, etc. Most soon learn that the assignments are really invitations. The invitations ask the student to explore and discover and report the voyage of discovery. I don’t really mean “Write whatever you want,” which is what so many students happily report in my course evaluations. I mean “What’s new?” I mean “What interests you that you can then use to interest me?”
I move students toward independent power as learners and writers by inviting them to assert that power, to practice it. Then I get to enjoy their interest and interests.
Done any creative thinking lately? I’d love to hear all about it.
