I agree that teachers should be co-learning along side their students but in my experience teaching has very much been a performance. I tend to exaggerate my enthusiasm and underplay my knowledge of the material when I teach. Sometimes if I ask a question and give the impression that I really don’t know the answer, students seem to feel more confident in offering their ideas. This tends to get a discussion going and then I can guide them to correctly formulate their solutions. In some ways, this is me teaching them. But I really think its my performance that makes students feel like they are part of a learning team with me as simply a more experienced investigator.

So my “teaching” experience is not in the traditional college setting, but I completely agree with the get up and move approach. Most of my experience comes from teaching a diverse audience classes on disaster response for the American Red Cross. When I started out, I was a very serious presenter, dutifully clicked through slide after slide and at the end of the three hour session, I was bored, exhausted and less than inspired. I can only imagine the pain my “students” felt. Unhappy with the experience, I decided to try a more interactive approach that brought the “disaster” to the classroom. For example, when I teach the class on how to run a shelter, I start by giving the students a pile of materials and tell them to follow their instinct and set up a shelter with no instruction. Watching them I can see what they instinctively know that is correct and what areas would cause confusion or safety issues. Then we can walk through the space they have created and instead of flipping slides, we can talk about methods and reasons for setting up the shelter or policies and procedures that are important. Tuesday, I had the great experience of facilitating an exercise for a Tribal government that I have been working with over the past two years. Not only did they address a lot issues that had been discussed in various classes over the past two years, but they had adapted policies and processes that worked better given their Native culture. At the end, one of the social workers who was attending came to me and said that even though she hasn’t been able to attend all of our training sessions, she still remembers the shelter class because it was the first and only time she has had any experience like that. So thinking of authentic teaching, I hope I can take this experience and turn that into something I can use in the academic environment.

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I like the idea that we let students pursue the topics that interest them, but I have two concerns. First, what if some students aren’t really interested in any of them, or not in enough of them to gain an acceptable level of coverage of the topic? You might ask why that student is in the class in the first place, but an example would be calculus or statistics for a student in the sciences. These courses are usually taught in the Math department, not the department of the specific sciences where the content could be put into the appropriate and more motivating contexts. Second, shouldn’t we teach students how to learn things that they really aren’t that interested in? It seems like this is a necessary life skill.

I am many things, but funny is not one of them. Without wanting to sound like I am jumping on the bandwagon, I also support everyone’s comments about finding other ways to engage the students and material. The degree of difficulty in coming up with active learning strategies, I think depends a bit on the subject matter and your audience. If you teaching to a beginning (100 or 200 level) audience, I would look for ways to apply the concepts to the world around them. Where could they experience the theories or ideas that you are trying to teach them about. I think this goes back to our earlier discussions about using imagination and play to encourage students to explore the ideas themselves and then bring it back to a discussion of what they experienced. Then you can work with them to construct the ideas and concepts based on that experience.

Given that many great researchers are not great teachers and that good teaching is very time consuming, it seems like in an ideal scenario, we’d have teachers that mostly teach and researchers that mostly research so that individuals in both roles can be more successful. There is likely some benefit of doing both, but it seems like it wouldn’t outweigh the benefit of being able to devote 100% of your time to either research or teaching.

I deeply appreciate this post and really have enjoyed participating in this type of engaged, networked learning. I wonder as I think back to some of my Master’s program counseling courses where we had lectures, our teachers inserted a lot of real world examples and other case studies to help bring what we were learning to life. We engaged in “fishbowl” activities to show how theories were applied, did role-playing activities to get a feel for how to engage with clients, and many student-led lectures and presentations were completed after we had researched material. Perhaps we were doing similar things without the technology in the latter part of the 2000s. So interesting to see how things are changing in teaching over time.

Thanks for your sharing your experience, Jake! That’s a good point about the logistics as well and I certainly hope the nerves will subside.

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I liked what you said about conceptualizing the teacher as a fellow student. Any educational interaction should ideally benefit all parties involved and teachers certainly have plenty they of learning they can do alongside their students. I also think you’re professor was right about the importance of simply feeling comfortable. It gives you the confidence to lecture when you need to but also the willingness to let the class carry on the discussion among themselves.

Congratulations on teaching your first class as well.

Didn’t mean to post anonymously. Post above by Ben Augustine!

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I think my field–wildlife science–is especially easy to get students engaged and moving around doing things. Half of the courses are either field courses or have a field component. Students are out flipping over rocks and playing in streams. It’s almost like we have an unfair pedagogical advantage! However, I focus on wildlife statistics, so I don’t get to capitalize on the field work advantage. But I do think having students solve coding problems in groups is an efficient and engaging way to teach programming and statistical modelling.

P.S. Your post elicited several humorous pictures in my head of people teaching a class in the stereotypical, animated preacher voice.

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