Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
C'est tout, j'espère
29 October 2004, 9:33 pm
Okay, I'm done with tinkering. I deleted the categories, and the html that led to 'em. So it's a simpler, more streamlined and more lightly indexed blog that you're left with now (acknowledging that the last point isn't necessarily a good one). So now everything here is the same as the parent site except for the header, and I'm hoping that this parity will lead me to enter not only more regularly, but less repetitively, content-wise.It's style facilitatin' substance, don't you know.
Want One
27 October 2004, 6:35 pm
There's a big perceptible difference between the papers I teach, by which I mean this: two of my classes are electives--the students who take them usually want to be there--whereas the other two are both compulsory. In one paper, students generally perceive there to be a benefit in taking it, in the other, much less so.I was thinking about this when talking to my mother today (an occasion when I often come up with my most succinct summaries about my teaching), and I said this:
Teaching goes the best when the teacher has something the students think they want. It might be knowledge about a subject area, or particular study skills, or a combination of the two. It might be a certain kind of life experience, or a way of looking at the world that the students feed off. It might even be that students fancy that teacher (although clearly this is a volatile element to add to the mixture).
In the papers where my students think that I have something they want or need, or where they come eventually to that perception, there is a sense of greater possibility than the papers where the students perceive that what they want or need is exterior to what's going on in the classroom. In one class in particular, my hunch is that a majority of students think I have little of relevance to offer them, either personally or professionally, and its the emphasis their culture places on politeness, as well as a general desire to stay out of trouble, that keeps the wheels of the class so slowly moving.
In the early days of my job, the compulsory and ill-loved paper (I'm talking about New Zealand Studies; can you tell?) was the only paper I taught, and it was a lonely rut to be tending, isolated from students and staff alike. The expansion of bridging programmes into arts teaching more generally rather saved my brain from imploding, I suspect, since it reminded me that I do have some teachable knowledge and hawkable qualities other than an ability to maintain class control for four hours a week.
Seasons
25 October 2004, 12:42 pm
One characteristic of working in Bridging Programmes this year has been that the programmes themselves are out-of-synch, timetable-wise, with the rest of the university. So, although undergraduate students are about to begin their second-semester exams, and billboards encouraging summer school enrolment are up around campus, my students are rather differently placed.The closest alignment is that of the the February Foundation students, who begin their exams in three weeks. But the June Foundation students won't sit theirs until the end of January, and the current intake of prep (local) students started only at the beginning of September, and continue until December.
In terms of what this means for being in the classroom, I feel as if my empathy is being fed out in somewhat contradictory directions. With my February students, it's a case of encouraging them to prepare for exams, much as undergraduates are at the moment preparing, to take stock of what they've learned this year but not to relax too much, just yet. Their experience fits with my own memories of student life, in which the arrival of spring becomes a symbol of the need to muster a final round of inner resources in order to push through to the other side of exams.
The June students, however, have to keep working through summer, when not only the climate but the rest of the campus will be taking life easy. Their experience isn't comparable either to the summer school students, who take on an intense period of work for a short period of time. These students have to keep working through what more traditionally is the idlest time of the year. It's a big ask, especially given that many of them start in June because they weren't able to get the required IELTS scores in time for February admission. I feel as if I've been working with them for a long time and there's still a long way to go. Messages in terms of what they need to do to succeed are still only getting through on an irregular basis, and my own spring looks to be filled with a fair weight of work not completed or handed in and patchy test scripts.
Of the local prep students it is harder to say anything, since this is not only the first year this programme has run, but also my first time teaching in a programme of this length at this time of the year. (The first intake, from February to June, matched almost exactly the undergraduate semester.) The intake was taken late, and in a hurry--a rapid-turnaround response to market demand. Somehow I think beginning in spring and finishing in summer might be the most difficult of all.
Not everyone is so seasonally-driven as me, especially given that many of my students still experience the seasons-in-reverse on the outside only: their minds are at home in East Asia and they themselves will be for our Christmas break. So what I'm really talking about is a challenge for the way I handle the students as their teacher; their own perceptions of the time of year and the way it affects their studies may be quite different.
Still Tinkering ...
25 October 2004, 12:30 pm
...as you can see, and although I'm struggling to persuade the date and time information for each entry to come down to a civilised level, I've had rather more success in getting the rest of the site to look like its parent template.So what you have here is a debased version of Sarah's original, which you can see in its rather more compliant glory here.
Take a Breath
24 October 2004, 9:34 pm
Any remaining readers would be forgiven for thinking I had abandoned blogging my teaching practice. But, despite my extended absence in the last month, that's not the case. These last five weeks have been the busiest of my year, in terms of contact hours in particular, and there have been days when I've looked back on the earlier part of the year with envy and some frustration, remembering how I had the time between classes to update here with my ideas as they came to hand.My recent experiences, then, highlight the problem at the heart of teaching, if you are working in a teaching position with a high number of contact hours (as I am). The scholarship of teaching argues--with evidence as the basis of argument, I hasten to add!--that in order to develop as teachers, we need to reflect on our practice and be informed about research not only in our fields, but into teaching more generally.
But give a teacher anything above around fifteen contact hours a week, and the emphasis necessarily shifts from critiquing one's practice to simply keeping up with the classes. A number of my colleagues teach the same paper to four or five different classes, whereas I in the last five weeks (by my own choice, I admit) have been teaching four different papers, two of which have been solely me, the whole me and nothing but me in charge of planning and assessment as well. (I realise that outside of the university that's no great shakes, but my position within the university sometimes seems to borrow the worst of both from the worlds of tutoring and lecturing, of which is it of course not quite either.)
My mind has been going a mile a minute around what's happening in each of these papers, but opportunities to get these thoughts transformed into bloggable prose have been frustratingly few. Over the next few days I hope to record, in summary form at least, some of what I and my students (and my colleagues) have been experiencing lately.
In the meantime, I'm pleased to report that the performance anxiety to which I referred in my last entry did abate eventually. I'm also feeling better for a few days' break. While I work up a head of writer's steam, you may like to stop off at two teaching blogs I much like, both kind enough to link to me: Mel at in favor of thinking, and la Lectrice at the blackboard jungle. Though teaching in entirely different settings, both are thoughtful writers who wear their politics lightly but well and from whose writing I always come away feeling as if I've encountered other minds and other narratives that can inform my own thinking (even if it's sometimes to think, well at least that's never happened to me in the case of more extreme adventures).
And yes, I'm still tinkering with the template. Today's change has been to apply the stylesheet from the template Sarah made for my main site. The stylesheet's sparkling xhtml compliance has exposed a number of bugs in my own crappy coding, so earlier pages here may show up strangely until I've finished editing them all. Pages 1-5 are good to go at present, with the rest to follow shortly.
Limitations, Expectations
02 October 2004, 12:06 pm
One thing I find tricky about keeping my thoughts about teaching rolling over on this little blog, is that I tend to have a cluster of things to say at once, and usually only one or two openings during the writing/teaching week to post, meaning that I don't usually follow the rules of blogitude in updating.For which, I trust, any readers will forgive me.
One thing I've thought about a lot over the last few years is the question of what my limitations are as a teacher, and what, following on from this, I can do to overcome them.
Many of the things that have held me back in the past are things that, with reflection and small application, I can manage, and most of these, I suspect, are not specific to my character or context: reconciling the requirements of the course to the needs and abilities of the students; teaching classes in a way that rewards the kind of study skills that my students need to develop for university at the same time as allowing them room to succeed as they currently are; keeping sufficiently ahead of deadlines in terms of preparation and marking to minimise stress; facilitating dialogue with my colleagues so that we build a community of practice.
All of these are things I've worked on for myself, with my students and in the context of the programme I teach in, over the last three and a half years since I shifted from teaching as an accompaniment to study to teaching as my main activity. But consistent throughout my experience has been another limitation which relates, I suspect, to the kind of person I am and the expectations I have for myself, and that is my massive self-doubt whenever starting something new, whether it be starting with new students, or a new course.
With new students in a course I've already taught, it's not so bad, since I have at least one variable that's predictable: the curriculum. But when I have new students in a new course, especially when it's a course I particularly want to teach, I can expect at least four weeks of almost paralysing worry about my ability to deliver what the students need. It's not until I get some data which proves that things are going fine--usually the students' feedback or burgeoning success with the work we're doing--that I can let myself off the hook.
This self-doubt and worry is completely invisible to colleagues and students, who are usually surprised or even shocked if I reveal, after the fact, my tremendous nerves. It makes no sense to them--and, indeed, it makes little sense to me, especially once I have built a relationship with students and know them a little as people, rather than as theoretical learners whom I must engage.
But it's also a lighter version of this self-doubt that acts as a motivating force in my professional life anyway: the awareness that teaching practitioners are far from perfect, that teaching is a challenge to be met, that activating student learning requires a kindler, gentler version of eternal vigilance. It's the project nature of teaching--of constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what's going on in the classroom between teacher and students--that makes it so satisfying, since, when things go right and students succeed, you know that you've done what you could to enable their success.
Before I know the students and the course we're in, however, my doubts about my ability to fulfil the demands of the unknown are a stick I beat myself with, a beating that doesn't stop until I have the classroom version of empirical proof that things are going okay.
In the prep study skills course that's been running for four weeks now, it was when a Russian student (one of a few second language learners in the programme) said to me that what we were doing in class was really helpful for him in organising his essay, at the same time as I noticed the tutorial group was quick to carry out any instructions and happy to give feedback to the group, that I got my mental relief.
My one consolation has been that, this time, the period of self-doubt last only about three-and-a-half weeks, as opposed to six weeks at the beginning of the year with my prep literature paper. Perhaps if I can continue to reason with, and be kind to, myself, I'll get it down eventually to an unsettled flicker just before I write the first lecture of a new paper.
At the present rate, that should take about two or three years. Now, that'd be something.