Derek Malone-France: Making Connections to a Class
Writing fellow says paying attention to the different needs of students makes a difference
Too often, we are presented with lists -- often deceptively short lists -- of pithy prescriptions for "good teaching." The truth, of course, is that good teaching necessarily defies such formularized neatness and simplicity, precisely because it has little to do with generalities and everything to do with attention to the particularities of specific situations (and students).
Obviously, it's important to design courses that promote predictable patterns of learning, but, in the end, every class is in some measure sui generis, and every student is a person with a particular history and particular needs. No amount of pre-semester preparation can compare in terms of positive pedagogical effect to time spent during the semester building relationships with (and between) students. This is the often discussed, but rarely realized, ideal of the "intellectual community."
One good way to promote such a community is to treat student's own texts (and a page of mathematical equations is as much a text as a philosophical essay) as primary texts in the course. Students learn best when their own thinking processes are made a subject of inquiry, and they gain a deeper understanding of the material that they are studying when they are forced to think about how they are thinking about the issues at hand. We might speak of exposing the unconscious methodology of their own thinking to them and, then, requiring them to subject that methodology itself to a critical analysis.
One effective way to do this, and simultaneously to create opportunities for building intellectual relationships, is to engage students in a drafting and revising process, one that forces them to subject their articulations of their own thinking to more prolonged attention, while giving you the chance to engage each students as an individual learner. Of course, this requires more of your time, just as it requires more of theirs, and that brings us back to the original point: Good teaching is hard work, and don't let any pedagogical list-makers convince you otherwise.