The Most Effective New Tool in Teaching and Learning: You
“Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”
― Virginia Woolf
Many of you are likely way too young to remember the movie, The Paper Chase, it is one of my all-time favorites, and lately, I’ve been taking to having it streaming in the background as I settle into my weekend routine of grading. As a quick synopsis, the setting of the movie is an elite east coast law school, and the antagonist is the feared and respected law professor, Charles Kingsfield played by the brilliant John Houseman. For me, the most meaningful line in the film is Professor Kingsfield telling his intimidated class, “You teach yourselves the law… but I train your mind.” As a professor, Kingsfield came of age long before the practices of cognitive and educational psychology were imparted upon higher education. It’s difficult for me to imagine the commanding Kingsfield attending a seminar on how to “how to flip your classroom” or “rubrics and assessment strategies.”
It’s not that Kingsfield could not have benefitted from some professional development as a faculty member — all of us who teach in higher education can — but for his time he did just fine on his own, in his class, it was sink or swim. Kingsfield didn’t worry about retention reporting, making videos, clickers in the classroom, metacognitive learning, avoiding micro-aggressions, backward design, learning styles, Bloom’s taxonomy, active learning, gamification, or badging. I for one remember when iPads and smart boards were going to change everything in the classroom, and hybrid classes would result in a cadre of brilliant and happy students who would depart the academy as life-long learning critical thinkers, and we could all go home for tea at the end of the day.
I am not saying that all of the fads in the science of teaching and learning are hogwash, they are not — our students all benefit when we take bits and pieces away from the latest instructional techniques and appropriately deploy them in our classes. In some cases, little teaching tweaks can go a long way, yet many of us have 15 or fewer weeks to cram in an already full instructional load and don’t have the time to shoehorn in a “peer-led active learning group activity” to see if it helps accomplish our course objectives. When the assessment police come at the end of the semester, I need to make sure my students have achieved mastery in whatever objectives have been foisted onto my syllabus.
It is helpful at this juncture to pause and think about our own educational experiences as students. The professors who had the most significant impact on me were not the ones who forced me to participate in group learning activities or other dubious exercises in educational punditry. The professors I respected the most did most things wrong if measured by today’s standards. In the past two decades or so the notion of the “sage on the stage” has been denigrated by educational experts as a relic of the dark ages of passive learning. When the sage’s trendy replacement, the “guide on the side,” came into the lecture hall (think about the irony here) it was a move to improve teaching. Perhaps by chance, or not, retention and graduation rates declined during this same period; any implication of a correlation is spurious at best, so let’s leave it at that.
I for one liked the sages. In my experience, these were the professors who were published and were experts in their field. They were, in many cases unbeknown to themselves, educational constructivists, who taught through stories that their students could relate to and build upon. We all wanted to be like the sage, immersed in their fields and knowledgeable. They motivated us to learn and do scholarship, and it was intrinsic, not forced upon us under threat of failure or double-secret academic probation — and there wasn’t an EdD or retention expert in sight. There were to be sure bad sages, those who today would be single-star fodder for the RateMyProfessor crowd, but the good ones had an impact and made you want to learn.
Before I dig too deep of a hole for myself, I embrace the discipline of teaching and learning studies. I am a professor and an administrator who has both praised and promoted newfangled technology-based teaching techniques and I will continue to do so. It’s important that we measure, assess, and accomplish our learning objectives to make sure that our students are receiving practical value from their pricey education. To this end, we need to learn about and leverage all the new techniques and technologies when it makes sense to do so, but at the same time not lose sight of what really matters — that teaching is a people business.
My point is that the most important technology in the classroom is you — the teacher. If you are likable, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic about your field, your students will want to learn. If you talk about the leaders in your area and the latest breakthroughs in your discipline, students will be motivated to learn even more. If you encourage your students — the simple feedback note on an essay or test that says “I think you have the potential to master this material, and here is how you can do better” you can change a life. If you can impart content through stories that students can relate to it sparks interest and understanding. Being an empathetic human is always the best technique in the classroom — at least that’s my takeaway.
Professor Kingsfield was not an overtly friendly guy, he commanded respect through intimidation in a style that could be loosely construed as tough-love. He was not everyone’s favorite professor, in one scene the protagonist student, Hart loses his temper and says “You… are a son of a bitch, Kingfield!” To which Kingsfield replies, “Mr. Hart! That is the most intelligent thing you’ve said today. You may take your seat.” This could never happen in today’s classroom — and it shouldn’t, but it is indicative of pedagogical mastery — challenging a student while keeping them fully engaged. As Virginia Woolf said, the most essential thing you can do as a teacher is to get the student to believe in herself, and this is the one thing that technology cannot do.
