I love reading pedagogical literature. You never know what you will happen onto next. This afternoon I found an article in Pedagogy (it’s a pedagogical periodical in the field of English) written by a group of graduate students describing their experiences in a required professional development seminar on teaching literature. The article is full of insights, many wise beyond the limited teaching experience of the group, but I was particularly taken with how they described one of their assignments, which asked them to write (with annotated bibliography) a philosophy of teaching.

As usual, I’m working on a book. At the present moment I’m trying to write a positive and constructive chapter on those institutionally mandated student ratings. Believe me, it’s a struggle. Ratings are so misused and so misunderstood. Institutions use instruments created by political processes. Frequently they contain items unrelated to the research identified components of instruction that can be linked to learning outcomes. Administrators rank faculty and imagine that a teacher with a 6.12 overall score deserves a higher raise than someone with a 6.00 score. And faculty believe all manner of myths: that ratings measure popularity and that the easy course wins high scores, for starters.

Robert Tauber and Cathy Mester say in their book, Acting Lessons for Teachers, that if you do an ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) search on the word “enthusiasm” and combine it with “teaching” 716,000 citations come up. I didn’t try it so I can’t verify the claim, but as they note that’s a “staggering” number of citations that attests to the importance of enthusiasm in teaching.

“If we want to be co-learners and co-teachers with students, if we want to mess their lived experiences with our disciplinary expertise, if we want to construct a classroom environment that legitimizes their voices, and if we want to create avenues for them to explore the possibilities of being agents of change, then we need to do a lot of creative, critical and challenging work to ensure that these goals are achieved.”

“One reason that teachers lecture is that it is ground that they totally control. It may be why the practice has held on for so long in the face of overwhelming evidence ... that it does not work very well to promote student learning of either the subject matter or larger general education goals like understanding others or participating in community activities. As soon as you open your classroom to serious dialogue that recognizes the legitimacy of ideas worked up by students, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Students may raise questions you never thought of. They may disagree with you, causing you to defend your point of view and, heaven forbid, even revise future lectures.”

I’ve always maintained that teachers have a right to bottom lines. If you can’t teach when students are eating or if you think that eating prevents others from learning, prohibit the eating. But now I’m wondering.

A recent analysis of the teaching vs. research debate highlighted in the March issue of The Teaching Professor was a welcome find. The argument just seems to go on an on, even though everybody involved recognizes that teaching and research require very different skill sets. As authors Prince, Felder and Brent (all notables in the field of engineering education) point out, “The primary goals of research is to advance knowledge, while that of teaching is to develop and enhance abilities.” To accomplish those goals, “excellent researchers must be observant, objective, skilled at drawing inferences and tolerant of ambiguity, and excellent teachers must be skilled communicators, familiar with the conditions that promote learning and expert at establishing them, and approachable and empathetic.” (p. 283)

I’m reading such an interesting book about teaching: Michael Newman’s Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. I already did a piece about it in a recent issue of the newsletter, but I’m interviewing Michael for a Magna Online Seminar in April (for information, see www.magnapubs.com/calendar/194.html), and for that I need to do a careful, thoughtful read of the book.

I asked a high school friend why he likes video games so much. “It’s fun because at the level you’re on you can do some things but not others. You really want to learn how to do those things you can’t so you can move on to the next level. And you feel like you’re so close … you just keep trying and trying and then you get it.”