In the Classroom

Teaching Strategies

Setting A Positive Climate
Getting your Students Involved
Motivating Your Students
Working With Students
Covering the Material
(Not) Knowing all the Answers
Using the Blackboard
Different Ways of Learning

Active Learning

Theory
Practice

TEACHING STRATEGIES

Setting a Positive Climate

It is your responsibility to ensure that the classroom atmosphere encourages all students to participate. In general, this can be accomplished by keeping the following points in mind.

• Manage the discussion so that talkative students do not intimidate reticent ones.

• Treat your students’ questions (and especially their mistakes) with respect and interest and give immediate and comprehensive feedback whenever possible. Wrong answers can be handled in a way that maintains a student’s dignity, and often you can use them to extract an important point and clear up confusion. If a student were to mix up the terms “neurosis’’ and “psychosis,’’ for example, you might say, “They are easy to confuse. Both may entail similar kinds of psychic disturbances, as you know, but to different degrees. The challenge is determining how severe these disturbances are. Coming up, we will look at several cases that illustrate both neurosis and psychosis.” Such an intervention corrects the student without injuring any egos.

• We all appreciate compliments, especially when we put ourselves on the line in the scrutiny of a classroom. The approval of a teacher, whether a teaching fellow or professor, strengthens a student’s feelings of self-worth. You can show your approval by simply saying “good’’ or “thank you” in response to excellent points or perceptive questions, or you can summarize points students have made and credit individual students by name. For example, “…as Trevor said earlier…” or “Let’s pursue Susan’s idea about the provenance of the plays while remembering Judith’s caution concerning current scholarly disputes.”

• Be aware of how someone’s background may affect their success or confidence in the subject.

• Be sensitive to students with disabilities.

• Be aware of biases or classroom dynamics that dissuade certain students from participating.

Getting Your Students Involved

The sooner you create a general climate of participation and involvement in the material, the better. One way to foster this atmosphere is to create opening questions or exercises in which all students participate. One English teacher begins his section on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by asking “What images remain with you after reading the poem?” Another teacher begins her third-year German class with a quick vocabulary-building exercise. A third teacher begins his anthropology section by passing out a round of bones from which each student is asked to identify one.

These techniques allow students to participate in class easily and quickly. Occasionally there is a need to lecture brieﬂy before opening the ﬂoor to discussion, but in a small group, lecturing at length can be stiﬂing. The longer you put off student participation in your class, the more difﬁcult it will be to create an engaging learning climate.

There are techniques that can help you draw out shy students as well. When one student asks or answers a question, there are often others who would have liked to ask or answer it. It is your responsibility to encourage everyone to participate or to feel included in the class by how you call on students, and the more you know about your students’ backgrounds, the easier it is to call on them in an encouraging way. You can ask students to comment when you know they have some relevant knowledge or experience. For example, you might pose the following question to a psychology concentrator in an English course: “John, you’re interested in psychology. How do you think Swift manipulates his audience through the creation of an ironic persona?” This tactic enlists John’s expertise and invites him to apply himself more vigorously to your literature course. His contribution to the class is most likely to be characterized by deeper thought than before.

You can encourage quiet students by redirecting one student’s question to the whole class while looking inquiringly in the direction of the quiet student. One professor in the government department uses quiet students’ names as part of illustrations in class, such as: “Suppose Anna were the manager of a ﬁrm in the Soviet Union and Joseph were the manager of a ﬁrm in the United States. How would their roles differ?” Other students begin to answer the question, and within a few minutes Anna and Joseph will likely participate in the discussion too.

In any class you may notice several students (or yourself) begin to lose energy as time goes on, both intellectually and physically. At this point it may be useful to change the mood of the class entirely. Keep a very different task in reserve so that you can shift your students’ attention enough to refresh their thinking. If you will be discussing two theoretical articles in your sociology course, bring a newspaper article that reﬂects the application of the theory. Especially in classes lasting more than an hour, a short break will refresh your students enough to get them to the end of class. If you bring food to class (as some TFs do), have it during a break in the middle of a long class, rather than at the beginning. You’ll ﬁnd that the last half of your class will be livelier.

Motivating Your Students

Teachers often assume that students are of two types. There are those who ﬁnd the work too difﬁcult and drop the course, and those who stick it out, work hard, and earn good grades. Yet, many teachers underestimate their own inﬂuence on how much time and effort their students will put into their course.

To be too demanding may be intimidating and may cause your students to shut down. On the other hand, reminding them of the difﬁculty of exams and the necessity of keeping up with the course, as well as promptly grading daily or weekly assignments, may keep the level of performance high.

Inspiration is the best motivator, so be enthusiastic about your subject. Explain what you ﬁnd intriguing about your discipline, and show it in every section. Do not let yourself become apathetic or cynical—your students will imitate you. If you do not value what your students are learning, they won’t either. The most successful teachers inspire their students by their example.

Working with Students

Although you may think of yourself as a graduate student, from the point of view of your students, you are their teacher and mentor. For many students, the teaching fellow is the teacher with whom they have the most contact. While the professor’s lectures may inspire them and stimulate their curiosity about a ﬁeld, it is in your sections that students will test their understanding, raise questions, and explore their implications. You must motivate them to do the work, maintain realistic expectations for their performance, generate an intellectually stimulating atmosphere, and listen with interest as they explore ideas freely.

Since you meet with the students in small groups, you are in a better position than the professor to see how well they are doing. Since students may ﬁnd you more approachable than the professor, you will be asked for help more often and will be in a better position to identify students’ difﬁculties and successes.

Covering the Material

Some professors are very speciﬁc about what they want TFs to do, to the point of writing out the problems to be solved in section or specifying discussion questions. Others give their TFs a great deal of independence. In order to determine what to teach and how to teach it, discuss the purpose of section with the course head or head teaching fellow. Otherwise, you will feel at a loss, and students will complain that sections are a waste of time. Is the aim to present new material that complements lectures, to discuss readings, or to be sure that students have learned specific facts, concepts, and analytical methods? Successful sections have a clear purpose that is communicated to students so they know what they have accomplished at the end of each meeting.

It is also crucial that you know what is going on in the course outside your section. For that reason, it is essential that you attend course lectures along with your students (unless your course head explicitly excuses you).

Another good way for TFs (and course heads) to decide what must be covered in both lecture and section is to consider the ﬁnal exam and determine what students will be asked to do. TFs who are unfamiliar with the course or the department’s curriculum should look at past examinations and see what concepts, material, and methods students are going to be asked to master. (Past exams are available for many courses on their websites, in Lamont Library, and in House libraries.)

(Not) Knowing All the Answers

Many beginning TFs worry that they will be expected to know everything, which is, of course, impossible. Students will not expect you to answer every question, but you shouldn’t brush off relevant questions just because you do not know the answer immediately. You can look up answers and discuss the question during the next class, or you can encourage students to ﬁnd the answers on their own. Too often, students will arrive in your section with the impression that they must not display any ignorance or doubt about a subject, and one way to create a positive atmosphere is to let students know that you welcome not knowing as part of the learning process. If you are neither evasive nor defensive about not knowing an answer to a question, that will stimulate both students’ curiosity and respect for you. If you are lucky, students will raise points that you have not considered. Nourish this by not limiting discussion to questions that only you can answer.

Using the Blackboard

In some classes, students’ notes are an exact copy of what the instructor puts on the blackboard. These notes help students with homework assignments and to prepare for exams, so effective boardwork provides students with a model for solving problems on their own.

Here are several concrete suggestions for practicing and improving your boardwork:

•    Start off with a clean slate. Writing that is left from a previous class may create confusion. When you shift topics during the class hour, erase the board completely to make the transition visual as well as verbal.

•   Determine how much of the board is visible before beginning to write. Ask students in the back and on the sides what they can see. If the chalk squeaks, break it into smaller pieces and hold it at a small angle in relation to the board.

•   Write with your arm fully extended to one side of your body so as not to cover what you have written. Talk while writing at the board and turn toward your students whenever possible. This is especially important for math and science teachers to remember as they often write long equations and formulas on the board. For students trying to understand new or complex ideas, it is essential that they follow your train of thought. Do not discuss material at length with your back to the students; they will not be able to hear you, and you will not be able see their reactions in time to forestall confusion.

•   Your handwriting must be legible to everyone in the room. Make sure the size of your letters and numbers is appropriate. In a large lecture hall you may have to use special large chalk to make your writing visible to students seated far from the board. Check this by walking to the back of the room before or after class to see if your writing is adequate.

•   Carefully structure your boardwork. Hypotheses, key points, and conclusions should be highlighted, boxed, or otherwise emphasized. Use headings to mark each new idea. Write out a complete statement of the problem to be solved or the question to be addressed. Label theorems, graphs, and examples explicitly. Define each of the variables you use. This will prove invaluable to your students when they sit down to study from their notes.

•   Do not simplify expressions by erasing, as it may confuse note-taking students. It is better to draw a single strike through expressions and formulae to simplify the problem and to write the new expressions above or below.

•   Do not erase important information, especially new material, before you absolutely have to.

Using Powerpoint or similar programs can solve some problems associated with the blackboard. You can face the class while writing, and text and images can be greatly enlarged when projected. But these beneﬁts are not without cost. If you darken the room, students are apt to become less alert, and you may go through the material too quickly without the pacing that blackboard writing brings. Such technology can be helpful, but its use must be carefully thought through.

Different Ways of Learning

Students vary greatly in the ways they learn and think. While some love to debate a point abstractly, others need to ground concepts in their own experience; some work best in groups, while others need to work alone; some need speciﬁc, concrete tasks, while others need the freedom to investigate on their own; some work best verbally, others visually.

Teaching fellows can enhance their teaching by learning about a variety of learning styles, by acknowledging that ways of learning other than their own are valid, and by introducing a variety of ways of engaging with the course material. Classroom and homework exercises can be devised to accommodate these differences. For more information on learning styles, see the Bok Center or the Bureau of Study Counsel.

ACTIVE LEARNING

Theory

When we first teach, many of us assume that the way to teach is to tell students what we know. We might do this by summarizing a chapter of history, explicating a poem, proving a theorem, or presenting a model of chemical interaction. We have many reasons for proceeding this way: as students, we’ve spent a lot of time listening to others tell us what they know, and teaching, at the very least, seems to mean transferring knowledge. Yet telling students what we know only partly deﬁnes the enterprise. For students to learn effectively, they must become more than consumers of our words; they must actively engage with the material.

Fortunately for teachers, students do not simply reproduce what we say like tape recorders. In fact, their minds are busily selecting, amending, and editing their own versions of what they hear. Even the apparently passive exercise of listening becomes an active process of creating one’s own meaning and understanding. Teaching with that in mind suggests that we engage students in their own purposeful actions, ask them questions, have them solve problems, or master a creative process.

Practice

To make the most of active learning, we need to step back and allow our students to take over, putting them to work in ways that allow us to step back and observe them, to intervene when guidance is needed, and to offer feedback that reinforces and stimulates their efforts.

Take this example: In preparation for a ﬁeld trip, a teaching fellow in geology invites his students to examine various rock samples and then draw pictures of these rocks on the chalkboard. He asks the students to make observations, to seek information by touch as well as sight, to ﬁnd out what happens when they scratch the rocks with a knife, and to make inferences from their experiences.

The teaching fellow is engaging his students in active learning. He is, in effect, applying the dictum attributed to Wittgenstein: “You haven’t seen something until you’ve drawn it.” So, in a sense, is the history teacher who asks her students how they would lead the Russian Revolution to illustrate the Leninist “authoritarian state.” Course material is just raw material; what students do with it in response to tasks set by the teacher is what results in their learning.

Classroom activities such as the following provide opportunities for active learning:

•    Have students bring a short written summary of a reading assignment to the class in which they will discuss it.

•   Take students into the ﬁeld to encounter the operational realities of abstract ideas.

•   Have your students in a government section consolidate their understanding of a textbook chapter on Federalism by setting up their own federal system.

•   In an astronomy class, have the students grapple with the concept of relativity by pretending that Einstein is coming to visit and thinking up questions to ask him.

•   In a psychology tutorial, set up a debate where each student or group of students takes the position of a different theorist.

•   Ask students to wrestle brieﬂy with a conceptual problem before giving them a lecture that addresses it.