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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Energize your classrooms with these key techniques for college teaching Students say the best teachers get them excited about learning, stretch their thinking, and keep them actively involved in class. But with increasingly diverse classrooms and constantly changing technology, each semester throws up new challenges for engaging students. Discover how to keep your teaching, and your students, energized with The Skillful Teacher, a practical guide to effective techniques, approaches, and methods for today's college classrooms. Providing insights, reflections, and advice from his four decades of college teaching, Stephen Brookfield now adapts his successful methods to teaching online, working with diverse student populations, and making classrooms truly inclusive. As well as being completely revised, updated, and rewritten, this edition adds six brand new chapters on: * Teaching critical thinking * Using play and creativity in the classroom * Teaching in teams * Helping students take responsibility for learning * Teaching about racism * Exercising teacher power responsibly Readers will delve into what learning feels like from a student's perspective, as well as absorb the wisdom of veteran college faculty with whom the author has worked. Themes from the bestselling previous editions remain, but are revisited and expanded with the perspective of an additional decade in the classroom. This authoritative guide is now even more comprehensive to better serve teachers looking to improve. Whether you are new to the classroom or are looking to rise to new challenges, The Skillful Teacher will provide answers, expand your repertoire of techniques, and invigorate your teaching and your classrooms.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Audience
Overview of the Contents
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1: Experiencing Teaching
Muddling Through as the Honorable Response to Uncertainty
Teaching as White Water Rafting
Growing into the Truth of Teaching
Being Experts on Our Own Teaching
Chapter 2: The Core Assumptions of Skillful Teaching
Assumption # 1: Skillful Teaching Is Whatever Helps Students Learn
Assumption # 2: Skillful Teachers Adopt a Critically Reflective Stance Toward Their Practice
Assumption # 3: Teachers Need a Constant Awareness of How Students Are Experiencing Their Learning and Perceiving Teachers’ Actions
Assumption # 4: College Students of Any Age Should Be Treated as Adults
Chapter 3: Understanding Our Classrooms
The One-Minute Paper
The Muddiest Point
The Learning Audit
The Critical Incident Questionnaire
A Caution
Chapter 4: What Students Value in Teachers
An Authoritative Ally: Credibility and Authenticity
Common Indicators of Credibility
Common Indicators of Authenticity
Chapter 5: Understanding and Responding to Classroom Emotions
Impostorship
Dealing with Impostorship
Cultural Suicide
Avoiding Cultural Suicide
Epistemological Panic Attacks: Roadrunning
Surviving the Rhythms of Roadrunning: Community
Chapter 6: Lecturing Creatively
Why Lecture?
Characteristics of Helpful Lectures
Final Thought
Chapter 7: Using Discussion Methods
Grading for Participation
Creating Ground Rules
Getting Discussions Started
Getting Students to Participate: Simple Exercises
Chapter 8: Teaching in Diverse Classrooms
Understanding the Diversity of Learners
Gauging Diversity
Team Teaching
Mixing Student Groups
Mixing Modalities
Visual or Oral Communication
Silent or Speech Filled Classrooms
We Will Always Fall Short
Chapter 9: Teaching About Racism
Preaching and Disdaining: Traps of Anti-Racist Teaching
Learning Racism
The Use of Narrative Modeling
Modeling Push-Back Through Team Teaching
A Final Thought
Chapter 10: Using Imagination, Play, and Creativity
Building the Case for Creativity and Play
Drawing Discussion
Lego Modeling
Collage
The Body as a Site for Learning
Chapter 11: Teaching in Teams
The Benefits of Team Teaching for Students
The Benefits to Faculty of Teaching in Teams
What Do Successful Teaching Teams Look Like?
Conclusion
Chapter 12: Teaching Students to Think Critically
How Is Critical Thinking Learned?
Beginning with Modeling
So What Do
You
Think Professor?
Scenario Analysis
Chapter 13: Teaching Online
Online Versus Face-to-Face Teaching and Learning
Warming Up the Online Environment
Setting Expectations Online
Evolving Ground Rules for Discussion Postings
Grading Rubrics
Creating Teacher Presence
Keeping Online Discussion Focused
Chapter 14: Giving Helpful Evaluations
Helpful and Unhelpful Evaluations
Improving Your Evaluations
Chapter 15: Helping Students Take Responsibility for Learning
Building Self-Confidence
Understanding Your Own Instinctive Preferences and Habits
Developing Informational Literacy
Designing Learning Projects
Chapter 16: Understanding Students’ Resistance to Learning
The Unacknowledged Problem of College Teaching: We Teach What We Love
The Trap of Conversional Obsession
Using Our Autobiographies as Learners to Understand Resistance
Understanding Resistance to Learning
Chapter 17: Responding to Students’ Resistance to Learning
Try to Sort Out the Causes of Resistance
Ask Yourself If the Resistance Is Justified
Research Your Students’ Backgrounds
When Appropriate Involve Students in Educational Planning
Use a Variety of Teaching Methods and Approaches
Assess Learning Incrementally
Check That Your Intentions Are Clearly Understood
Build a Case for Learning
Create Situations in which Students Succeed
Don’t Push Too Fast
Admit the Normality of Resistance
Try to Limit the Negative Effects of Resistance
Chapter 18: Exercising Teacher Power Responsibly
The Ubiquity of Power
What Do Students View as a Justifiable Exercise of Power and Authority?
When Power and Pedagogy Collide
Ethical Coercion
Chapter 19: Negotiating the Politics of Teaching
Become a Cultural Anthropologist of Your Institution
Attend to the Mission Statement
Building Alliances
Accumulate Deviance Credits
Choose Your Battles
Generate External Recognition of Your Efforts
Create a Paper and Electronic Trail of Agreements
Chapter 20: Staying Sane: 16 Maxims of Skillful Teaching
Maxim # 1: Attend to Your Emotional Survival
Maxim # 2: Expect Ambiguity
Maxim # 3: Perfection Is an Illusion
Maxim # 4: Ground Your Teaching in How Your Students Are Learning
Maxim # 5: Be Wary of Standardized Models and Approaches
Maxim # 6: Regularly Learn Something New and Difficult
Maxim # 7: Take Your Instincts Seriously
Maxim # 8: Create Diversity
Maxim # 9: Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks
Maxim # 10: Remember That Learning Is Emotional
Maxim # 11: Acknowledge Your Personality
Maxim # 12: Don’t Evaluate Yourself Only by Students’ Satisfaction
Maxim # 13: Remember the Importance of Both Support and Challenge
Maxim # 14: Recognize and Accept Your Power
Maxim # 15: View Yourself as a Helper of Learning
Maxim # 16: Don’t Trust What You’ve Just Read
References
More from Wiley
Name Index
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Figure 10.1
Figure 10.2
Figure 10.3
The Skillful Teacher
On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom
Third Edition
Stephen D. Brookfield
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Les Palenik | Shutterstock
Copyright © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Brookfield, Stephen.
The skillful teacher : on technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom / Stephen D. Brookfield. – Third edition.
1 online resource. – (Jossey-bass higher and audlt education series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-119-01987-9 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-119-01986-2 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-118-45029-1 (hardback) 1. College teaching. I. Title.
LB2331
378.1′25–dc23
FIRST EDITION
Preface
In 2015 I celebrated my forty-fifth year as a teacher by publishing this third version of The Skillful Teacher, a book that had first appeared on my twentieth teaching anniversary. Although many of the ideas from the first and second editions have found their way into this one, I have had the chance to rethink and better understand the essential dynamics and complexities of good teaching. So I have rewritten the entire book, including adding six new chapters on topics I felt needed addressing.
The starting point for the first edition of this book that appeared 25 years ago is the same. I have not altered my conviction that the essence of skillful teaching lies in the teacher constantly researching how her students are experiencing learning and then making pedagogic decisions informed by the insights she gains from students’ responses. The predictable rhythms of student learning, the importance of teachers’ displaying credibility and authenticity, the need to vary instructional approaches—all these themes were highlighted in the first edition and they continue to inform my own thinking and practice.
But other things have crept into the mix of this teacher’s life. There is the increasingly diverse student body most teachers work with today and the racial tensions this sometimes foregrounds, meaning that teaching about controversial issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia have entered many classrooms. There is the explosion of online education, which, like it or not, will be a major part of all future teachers’ lives. I have also come to a fuller appreciation of how we can exercise our power as teachers in responsible and effective ways to help students learn.
The importance of incorporating playful and creative elements into pedagogy has been something I have been forced to address, as is increasingly the experience of working in team teaching settings. I have also realized that teaching critical thinking is a project that crosses multiple disciplines and is central to higher education, as well as helping students take more responsibility for their learning. The latter is particularly important as the flipped classroom enjoins students to undertake more independent work in preparation for problem-focused classroom sessions. Consequently what you hold in your hands, or see on your screen, is a completely rewritten text.
My intention in writing The Skillful Teacher is to tell the real story of teaching as I live it. Although my own experience is front and center in the book, this is not because I feel my life is utterly fascinating! But I have noticed over the years that as I’ve described some of the tensions and contradictions I face in my own teaching, these often have universal elements embedded in them that others recognize. For example, the loss of self-confidence I feel when I pose what I think is a brilliantly provocative question only to be met by mute students and averted eyes is something most of us experience. I know I’m not alone in feeling thrilled when students say that what they’ve learned is useful, or that an activity we’ve completed is helpful. Alternately, I know that the demoralization and weariness I feel when, 10 minutes into a lesson, I realize I’m facing a trek through a parched desert of student disinterest is a common reaction.
All the institutions I’ve worked for operate on the assumption that teaching and learning are controllable and predictable and that we can set objectives for which student progress can be measured. Despite the system’s apparent rationality, the one thing we can expect with total confidence is uncertainty. For me teaching is full of unexpected events, unlooked-for surprises, and unanticipated twists and turns. It is also a highly emotional reality, a marvelously and frustratingly complex mix of moments when our hopes and plans are gloriously realized interspersed with episodes in which we feel lost and flailing. As I explore this mix I hope to show college teachers as flesh and blood human beings full of passions, foibles, and frailties. I want to understand how we can celebrate the messiness of teaching and how we can thrive in ever more diverse classrooms.
To me, then, The Skillful Teacher is a survival manual to help readers navigate the recurring and inevitable dilemmas, problems, and contradictions they face in their work. It is designed to reduce the mistaken and unjustified sense of guilt many of us feel when things don’t go as they should and our classrooms seem out of control. There is nothing worse as a teacher than feeling that everyone else in your institution is in complete command—cool, calm, and collected paragons of pedagogic virtue—while your own classrooms never seem to conform to the plans you have developed for them. You think that everyone else’s students are diligent, smart, and cooperative, while your own are truculent saboteurs, and that any problems you face have been created by your own incompetence.
This is a book meant for those difficult days—days when confusion and demoralization reign supreme in your world. On those days I want a book I can turn to that won’t lie to me about the complexity I’m facing, that will tell me honestly how difficult it is to teach well, and that will give me some insight into how I might analyze and respond to my problems. The point of such a book would be to help me find the energy and courage I need to get back into class the next day fired by a renewed sense of purpose. That’s a tall order for any book—and I know I’m bound to fall short—but The Skillful Teacher is my best shot at meeting it.
In writing this book I have set myself some difficult problems as an author. First, I’ve tried to ground whatever I write in easily recognized vignettes of college teaching. I’ve also attempted to write in a way that would encourage, strengthen, and even inspire. I’ve done this knowing that writing with a desire to inspire is usually a death knell that ensures the opposite happens. I’ve also tried to display enough understanding of the diverse contexts and problems of college teaching to offer some insights, advice, and practical suggestions that would go beyond reassuring clichés or banal, supposedly inspiring generalities. In effect, these three motifs—the experiential, the inspirational, and the practical—run through the entire book. They dominate its organization, comprise its major themes, and represent its chief purposes.
On the experiential plane I want to present a picture of teaching that is recognizable and truthful to readers. I draw this picture partly based on my own experience but also on accounts of college teaching provided by numerous researchers. These accounts emphasize unpredictability, ambiguity, and frustration just as much as they do fulfillment, success, and satisfaction. On the inspirational plane, I want to assert the importance, meaning, and effect of college teaching in the face of the barrage of criticisms college teachers have endured in the last few decades. College teachers—and their students—change the world in small, and sometimes big, ways.
Although I am strongly influenced by critical theory and its belief that colleges are part of what Louis Althusser (1971) called the ideological state apparatus, I don’t believe that teachers are blind to this fact or that they inevitably function as smooth, seamless agents of ideological indoctrination. Like Herbert Marcuse (1969), I think higher education is potentially an agent of liberation, opening students up to ideas and perspectives that had previously never occurred to them, and developing in them the requisite confidence in their own abilities and opinions that allows them to act on and in the world. So while I believe that colleges function in ways that reflect structural inequities in the wider society, I also believe that many teachers do their best to fight this tendency by developing their students’ powers of critical thinking and increasing their sense of agency.
I also reject those conservative, almost apocalyptic analyses of higher education that ring the alarm bells of relativism, multiculturalism, and political correctness to argue that in the face of moral disintegration what we need is to hark back to an era of classically derived verities. These analyses fail to match the complex ambiguity of contemporary adulthood and serve to support the wishful thinking of those who believe that college teaching boils down to the inculcation of universally agreed-on facts and the appreciation of higher (usually Eurocentric) truths. This is a cocktail party view of academe that has as its rationale helping students to acquire a stock of culturally approved concepts, dates, facts, and names. In this view the purpose of higher education is to learn to impress peers by the number and variety of culturally sanctioned terms one can drop into the conversation, thereby demonstrating one’s cultural literacy. From my standpoint cultural literacy requires the ability to critique the Eurocentric dominance of higher education curricula and to develop media and informational literacy about the explosion of information now available online.
Finally, on the practical level, I have tried to write a book that takes the major demands, dilemmas, and problems of college teaching and analyzes them in an informative and helpful way. It is easy to write a book long on experience and inspiration but short on practicalities. To avoid that danger I have analyzed the questions, issues, and concerns that have been raised most frequently by teachers in faculty development workshops I have run over the past 30 years. Answering those questions, issues, and concerns provides the focus for the chapters in this book. Most of these questions have had to do with practical issues, but a significant minority also deals with matters of political and emotional survival, which is why I have included chapters dealing with those themes. I provide plenty of suggestions and advice and give lots of exercises and techniques that I hope will help readers negotiate their way through the problems they face.
One difference in emphasis that The Skillful Teacher has when compared to many other texts on college teaching is that it is written from an adult educational perspective. I have often been puzzled by the absence of adult educational literature from books on college teaching. After all, college teaching is focused on learners who are partially or fully immersed in adulthood. In this sense, it is part of adult education. Yet the rich literature on adult learning and education is rarely acknowledged, let alone built on, in most works on college teaching. Teaching students in a variety of college settings is, to my mind, practicing a form of adult education. So one distinctive emphasis of The Skillful Teacher is the recognition of college students as early adult learners who benefit by being understood from the perspective of adult learning research, theory, and philosophy.
Because I wanted to write in a sympathetic way about the travails, pleasures, and serendipities of college teaching, I have adopted a particular prose style in the following pages. I have tried to cut down on citations of literature and to communicate as directly as possible using a conversational and personal tone. The book I would want to read for sustenance, advice, and encouragement after a bad day in the classroom would not be peppered with scholarly references and written in an academically formal manner. It would speak to me directly and concretely. So in The Skillful Teacher I have tried to write as I would speak, using the familiar you and the first person I throughout the text in an effort to cut down the distance between reader and author. I also use contractions—I’ll, we’re, it’s—to support the conversational tone.
Audience
The audience for this book is college teachers at all levels and in all settings, of higher education. I hope that some of the book will also be interesting to upper level high school teachers. But there is no “typical” reader for this book. I don’t have in mind a particular kind of teacher in a particular kind of college teaching a particular kind of subject. Instead, I hope the book can be read by a variety of people for diverse reasons. I hope it will be helpful to beginning college teachers who (as I was in the first years of my career) are wondering how they are going to get through the next day, much less the rest of the semester. I hope that teachers who are expert in their subject matter but who have not really thought much about how to set up classrooms, develop curricula, and vary instructional modalities to help students learn will find practical information about how to create these dynamics. I hope that relatively experienced teachers who are caught in dilemmas they seem to encounter again and again will find insights or suggestions on how to respond to these situations.
I hope, too, that readers who have been teaching for a long time and suffer from a sense of torpor or routine will find something to renew them and remind them why they became college teachers in the first place. Finally, I hope that teachers everywhere who are dogged by the suspicion that they fall woefully short of being the calm, controlled, skilled orchestrators of learning spoken about on faculty days (and featured in texts on teaching) will feel reassured by the common experience I have depicted.
Overview of the Contents
The book begins with a chapter on the experience of teaching that emphasizes its chaotic unpredictability and the ways this is viscerally experienced. I argue that skillful teaching resembles a kind of contextually informed “muddling through” classroom experience that involves our negotiating moments of surprise as we grow into our own truth about the realities we face. Chapter 2 explores the four core assumptions that inform the book: that skillful teaching boils down to whatever helps students learn, that the best teachers adopt a critically reflective stance toward their practice, that the most important knowledge we need to do good work is an awareness of how students are experiencing their learning and our teaching, and that we should always aim to treat students as adults. Chapter 3 explores the third assumption regarding the need to get inside students’ heads in more depth through an examination of various classroom research approaches, particularly the classroom Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ).
Chapter 4 continues the review of college learning through students’ eyes by considering the two characteristics of teachers that students say they value the most—credibility and authenticity. Specific examples of each of these characteristics are given so that readers can recognize when they are displaying them in their own practice so that they can be authoritative allies. In Chapter 5 I explore the typical emotional rhythms of student learning and how teachers can respond to these. Here I point to the similarities in the way teachers, as well as their students, experience college classrooms.
Chapters 6 through 11 focus on some of the practices most common to college teaching across disciplines and levels. These are lecturing (Chapter 6), discussion (Chapter 7), teaching in diverse classrooms (Chapter 8), teaching about racism (Chapter 9), integrating elements of play and creativity (Chapter 10), and teaching in teams (Chapter 11). In all these chapters I try to give examples of specific classroom exercises that will be helpful and to provide advice on when to judge which of these are most appropriate.
Chapter 12 considers how to help students think more critically, something I view as the overarching project of higher education. Teaching in online settings is the focus of Chapter 13, where I argue that despite the stereotype of online learning as disembodied and passive, many of the same principles that animate face-to-face classrooms apply in cyberspace. How to give helpful evaluations to students, and the elements these comprise, are considered in Chapter 14. After reviewing practices of effective assessment I then move to consider how teachers can encourage students to take more responsibility for their learning in Chapter 15.
Chapters 16 and 17 analyze the thorny question of why students resist learning that we consider to be in their best interests and how to respond to this push back. I consider the most common reasons that students display resistance and provide guidance on how to manage this so it does not get out of control and sabotage the course. I used to have a chapter titled Overcoming Resistance in the first edition. Now I understand better that it often cannot be overcome, only managed more effectively.
How we exercise our power as teachers is another new chapter. Here, in Chapter 18, I lay out the ubiquity of power dynamics in college classrooms and recount how students decide that we have exercised our power justifiably. The theme of power continues in Chapter 19 as I examine the ways in which political factors—both inside and outside college—affect the practice of teaching. I argue that teaching is an inherently political activity through which people learn how to treat each other democratically or autocratically. I also offer some strategies for political survival.
The final chapter examines how we can survive the emotional roller coaster of life in the college classroom. It contains 16 maxims of skillful teaching that summarize the main themes that emerge in the previous chapters.
Acknowledgments
My greatest acknowledgment must go to those various college teachers who have come up to me at conferences and workshops to tell me how useful they found earlier editions of this book. They provided the emotional impetus for me to write this third edition.
I know that thanks to editors often appear ritualistic but I hope that my gratitude for David Brightman’s supportive yet critical perspective is read as genuine. As always, David was full of useful ideas and provocative questions that helped me reshape the third edition of this book. Over the years he has constantly championed student-centered approaches and helped all the authors he’s worked with at Jossey-Bass improve their ability to communicate about theoretically informed practice. He will be missed as an editor, but our friendship will continue.
The University of St. Thomas and, in particular, my boss Dr. Sue Huber, have been unfailingly generous in providing me with all kinds of resources to support my writing. Finally, I would also like to thank the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education for allowing me to use the parts of Chapter 8 that were first published in the journal Adult Learning.
About the Author
The father of Molly and Colin and the husband of Kim, Stephen D. Brookfield is currently the John Ireland Endowed Chair at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Prior to moving to Minnesota, he spent 10 years as professor in the Department of Higher and Adult Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is still adjunct professor.
Stephen received his B.A. degree (1970) from Coventry University in modern studies, his M.A. degree (1974) from the University of Reading in sociology, and his Ph.D. degree (1980) from the University of Leicester in adult education. He also holds a postgraduate diploma (1971) from the University of London, Chelsea College, in modern social and cultural studies and a postgraduate diploma (1977) from the University of Nottingham in adult education. He holds three honorary doctor of letters degree from the University System of New Hampshire (1991), Concordia University, St. Paul (2003), and Muhlenberg College (2009) for his contributions to adult education practice.
He began his teaching career in 1970 and has held appointments at colleges of further, technical, adult, and higher education in the United Kingdom and at universities in Canada (University of British Columbia) and the United States (Columbia University, Teachers College, and the University of St. Thomas). In 1989 he was Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Technical and Adult Teacher Education in what is now the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. In 2002 he was Visiting Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. In 2003–2004 he was the Helen Le Baron Hilton Chair at Iowa State University. He has run numerous workshops on teaching, adult learning, and critical thinking around the world and delivered many keynote addresses at regional, national, and international education conferences. In 2001 he received the Leadership Award from the Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) for “extraordinary contributions to the general field of continuing education on a national and international level.” In 2008 he was also awarded the Morris T. Keeton Award of the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning for “significant contributions to adult and experiential learning.” In 2009 he was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. He is currently the John Ireland Endowed Chair in Education at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where in 2008 he won the university’s Diversity in Teaching and Research Award and the John Ireland Teaching and Scholarship Award.
Stephen is a six time winner of the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education: in 1986 for his book Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis of Principles and Effective Practices, in 1989 for Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting, in 1996 for Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, in 2005 for The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching, in 2011 for Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just Society (with John Holst), and in 2012 for Teaching Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Challenge Their Assumptions. Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning also won the 1986 Imogene E. Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education. These awards were all presented by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. The first edition of Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (2nd ed. 2005), which he co-authored with Stephen Preskill, was a 1999 Critics Choice of the Educational Studies Association. His text Powerful Techniques for Teaching Adults (2013) won the 2013 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature in Continuing Higher Education from the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. His other books are Adult Learners, Adult Education and the Community (1984), Self-Directed Learning: From Theory to Practice (1985), Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on Adult Education and Social Change (1987), Training Educators of Adults: The Theory and Practice of Graduate Adult Education (1988), The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust and Responsiveness in the Classroom (2nd. ed. 2006), Teaching Reflectively in Theological Contexts: Promises and Contradictions (co-edited with Mary Hess, 2008), Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (co-authored with Stephen Preskill, 2008), Handbook of Race and Adult Education: A Resource for Dialogue on Racism (co-edited with Vanessa Sheared, Juanita Johnson Bailey, Scipio A.J. Colin III, and Elizabeth Peterson, 2010), and Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers (co-authored with Alison James).
Chapter 1Experiencing Teaching
Passion, hope, doubt, fear, exhilaration, weariness, colleagueship, loneliness, glorious defeats, hollow victories, and, above all, the certainties of surprise and ambiguity; how on earth can a single word or phrase begin to capture the multilayered complexity of what it feels like to teach? Today’s college classrooms are more diverse than ever before, and the explosion of online learning and social media has thrown traditional conceptions of college teaching out of the window. The truth is teaching is a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction, and risk are endemic. Our lives as teachers often boil down to our best attempts to muddle through the complex contexts and configurations that our classrooms represent.
Muddling Through as the Honorable Response to Uncertainty
Muddling through a situation sounds like something you do before you’ve learned the truly professional response to it. It seems random, uncoordinated, and not a little amateurish. But muddling through should not be thought of as haphazard, nor as dishonorable. Muddling through is about all you can do when no clear guidelines exist to help you deal with unexpected contingencies. When a racially motivated fistfight broke out on my second day of community college teaching all I could do was to try and muddle through. No course I had taken had put me in a simulation or role-play where I had the chance to break up an imagined classroom fight, so I was clueless to know how to respond. Somehow (I don’t remember how) I managed to calm things down enough to finish the class. And for whatever reason, I had no more fights break out in class that year.
As we muddle through different teaching contexts we usually draw on insights and intuitions borne of experience. Sometimes these serve us well, but sometimes we quickly realize their limitations. For example, when something that worked wonderfully in class last semester only serves to provoke anger or confusion in students this time around, the highly situational nature of teaching is underscored. Administrators and politicians don’t like to hear that teaching is situational. They need to believe that standardized indicators of good teaching exist that can be proven to be reliable and valid across multiple contexts. I have spent my life in such systems and, while they may make the administrative task of assigning annual scores to a teacher’s performance easier, any correlation they have with an accurate assessment of what actually goes on in a classroom is often purely coincidental.
As you can see from the paragraph above, this is going to be an opinionated, some would say polemical, book. But the skepticism expressed above is not just my opinion. Studies of teachers’ lives (Preskill and Jacobvitz, 2000; Mattos, 2009) indicate how teachers muddle through their careers. They report their work to be highly emotional and bafflingly chaotic. Career counselors and popular films may portray teachers as transformative heroes skillfully navigating classroom dilemmas to empower previously skeptical students, but actual teacher narratives (Harbon and Moloney, 2013; Shadiow, 2013) emphasize much more how teaching is riddled with irresolvable dilemmas and complex uncertainties.
Some of these dilemmas, such as how to strike the right balance between being supportive to students and challenging them with tasks they resist, or how to create activities that simultaneously address all learning styles and racial traditions in a culturally and academically diverse classroom, exist in any contemporary institution. But many of these pedagogic dilemmas are compounded by the market-driven, organizational effectiveness paradigm that has taken hold in higher education.
As colleges find themselves under more and more pressure to attract students, create new programs, and move up the league tables of good and bad ratings, faculty find themselves working longer and harder than ever before. It is hard to imagine how you can make a difference in your students’ lives (something most of us probably want to do) when you’re teaching five to six courses a semester, have long advisee lists, and are required to serve on important committees and attend endless (and often apparently pointless) department or faculty meetings. Add to this the pressure to recruit students in the community, the expectation that you will bring in grant monies to help cover your salary, and the injunction that you publish and display other forms of professional engagement, and the problem researchers in higher education should study becomes not why college teachers quit but why they stay!
Sometimes, however, there’s a visceral joy in muddling through an unanticipated classroom situation. When the internet connection fails, your power point presentation dies, or your mind goes blank, when students viciously attack each other in a discussion or answer questions in ways that suggest they have completely misunderstood what you’ve been trying to demonstrate for the last 20 minutes, or when they ask you probing questions and you have no clue about the answers, you hang for a moment (sometimes for what seems like an uncomfortable eternity) above a precipice of uncertainty.
Of course this experience can be embarrassing or demoralizing, making you resolve then and there you were not cut out for teaching and should quit as soon as possible. But at other times an intuitive “gut” response comes to you and you find yourself doing something you’ve never dreamed of doing before and being astounded that it actually has positive effects!
An example of stumbling blindly into something approaching an appropriate response happened to me one day when I had prepared a series of dazzlingly provocative questions for discussion that I felt were bound to generate heated, rich, and informed conversation. I asked the first question and was met with blank stares and total silence. After counting off 15 seconds quietly in my head I then asked the follow-up question I had prepared. Again, silence. Now I started to panic and found myself answering the question I’d just asked. I stopped myself and raised the third question I’d prepared beforehand, the fail-safe one that I imagined I would be struggling to raise about 15 minutes before the end of the class after a vigorous and sustained conversation. Dreadful, shaming quiet met my question along with the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.
With no forethought I found myself saying something like this:
I know that speaking in discussions is a nerve-wracking thing and that your fear of making public fools of yourselves can inhibit you to the point of nonparticipation. I, myself, feel very nervous as a discussion participant and spend a lot of my time carefully rehearsing my contributions so as not to look foolish when I finally speak. So please don’t feel that you have to speak in order to gain my approval or to show me that you’re a diligent student. It’s quite acceptable to say nothing in the session, and there’ll be no presumption of failure on your part. I don’t equate silence with mental inertia or lack of commitment. Obviously, I hope you will want to say something and speak up, but I don’t want you to do this just for the sake of appearances. So let’s be comfortable with a prolonged period of silence that might, or might not, be broken. When anyone feels like saying something, just speak up. And if no-one does, then we’ll move on to something else.
To my astonishment this brief speech, born of total panic, seemed to unleash the conversational floodgates and a veritable torrent of student comment (well, it seemed like a torrent after the dry spigot of student silence) burst forth. After class that day a couple of students came up to me and told me that they never usually spoke in class discussions but that because I’d told them they didn’t need to talk they relaxed to the point where they felt emboldened enough to say something. Apparently, my taking the pressure of performance-anxiety off their shoulders so they did not feel they had to say something brilliant or profound to earn my approval had removed a barrier to their talking in class.
I wish I could say I thought this all out beforehand, that I knew in advance about the way in which performance anxiety constituted a barrier to student participation and had therefore worked out a shrewd pedagogic tactic to deal with this. That would be a lie. What I enjoyed seemed like pure dumb luck.
And yet to call it dumb luck is perhaps to underestimate the informed intuitive rumblings that lay behind this improvisation. My action was unpremeditated and instantaneous but that does not mean it was uninformed. On the contrary, there was a great deal of experience behind it, much of which concerned my own participation in discussion. As a college student I found discussions horribly intimidating and was highly conscious of the pressure to sound smart. I’m sure that an awareness of that pressure, and a realization that removing it would have helped me focus my energy on learning rather than performing the role of “smart and articulate student,” was operating at a preconscious level.
Teaching as White Water Rafting
One of my favorite metaphors is teaching as white water rafting. In both, periods of apparent calm are interspersed with sudden frenetic turbulence. Tranquility co-exists with excitement, reflection with action. If we are fortunate enough to negotiate crises successfully we feel a sense of self-confident exhilaration. If we capsize our self-confidence is shaken as we are awash in self-doubt. These are the days we vow to quit at the end of the semester. All teachers regularly capsize and all teachers worth their salt regularly ask themselves whether they have made the right career choice. Experiencing ego-deflating episodes of disappointment and demoralization is quite normal. Indeed, being aware that we regularly face inherently irresolvable dilemmas in our teaching, and that we hurt from these, is an important indicator that we are staying awake and remaining critically alert.
Teachers who say that no irresolvable dilemmas exist in their lives are, in my view, either exhibiting denial on a massive scale or getting through the school day on automatic pilot. Some teaching dilemmas are so intractable for the simple reason that they have no solution. The most we can hope for is to craft provisional responses that seem to make sense for the context in which we find ourselves and that lessen rather than exacerbate the tensions we inevitably feel.
I know I will never strike the right balance between being credible and authentic because no such perfect balance exists. I know I will never connect with everyone’s preferred learning style 100 percent of the time because the diversity of my students’ personalities, experiences, racial and cultural traditions, and perceptual filters (as well as my own personality, racial identity, learning style, cultural formation, and professional training) make that impossible. And I know too that I will never judge correctly exactly when I should intervene to help a struggling student and when I should leave her to find her own way through her learning challenge.
Whenever I’m on an interviewing committee deciding who will be appointed to a new teaching position, one of my questions to candidates is always to ask them which of the teaching dilemmas or problems they face they have never been able to solve. If a teacher tells me they have no such dilemmas or problems then mentally I move a long way toward striking them off my list of “possibles.” I don’t want to teach with someone who either refuses to acknowledge that such dilemmas exist or, knowing of their existence, chooses to ignore them.
It seems to me that classrooms can be thought of as arenas of confusion where teachers are struggling gladiators of ambiguity. Just when we think we have anticipated every eventuality, something unexpected happens that elicits new responses and causes us to question our assumptions of good practice. Yet admitting to feeling unsure, realizing that our actions sometimes contradict our words, or acknowledging that we are not in control of every event is anathema to many of us. In our heads a good teacher is like a skilled archer with a quiver full of powerful arrows. Whenever a problem arises we feel we should be able to reach into the quiver, choose the appropriate arrow, fit it to our bowstring, and fire it straight at the heart of the problem, thereby resolving it. Appearing confused, hesitant, or baffled may appear to us a sign of weakness. And admitting that we feel tired, unmotivated, or bored seems a betrayal of the humanitarian, charismatic zest we are supposed to exhibit.
When all these feelings arise, as they are bound to with alarming regularity, two responses are typically called forth. The first is to be weighed down with guilt at our apparent failure to embody the idealized characteristics of a properly humane, omniscient, perfectly balanced teacher. This response illustrates Britzman’s (2003) myth that “everything depends on the teacher.” This myth holds that if the class has gone well it’s because you have been particularly charismatic that day, adeptly diagnosing students’ learning styles and designing the day’s activities to respond to these. Conversely, if the class has bombed or gone awry you assume it must be down to your incompetence.
The second response to feeling clueless is quickly to retreat to a position in which you deny that anything untoward has happened, saying, in effect, that your performance has been exemplary but that your students, colleagues, or superiors are too narrow-minded or unsophisticated to see this fact clearly.
When things inevitably fall apart it seems to me that the most reasonable response is somewhere between these two extremes of self-flagellating guilt and self-delusional denial. In traversing terrains of ambiguity, chaos and contradiction are inevitable. The old military acronym SNAFU (“Situation Normal, All Fouled Up,” to put it politely) nicely approximates the practice of teaching. Recognizing this, however, usually comes only after a series of profoundly unsettling experiences.
For those of us trained to believe that college classrooms are rational sites of intellectual analysis, the shock of crossing the border between reason and chaos is intensely disorienting. It’s an experiential sauna bath, a plunge from the reassuring, enervating warmth of believing that classrooms are ordered arenas into the ice-cold reality of wrestling with constant dilemmas and contradictions.
But just because our classroom practices might seem to be contradictory (for example, prompting discussion by telling students they don’t need to speak), this doesn’t mean we should throw our hands in the air and believe that good teaching is a matter of mysterious chance. I will argue in this book that the key to being a good college teacher is regularly collecting data from your students concerning how they are learning, week in week out, and then using that information to guide your decisions.
Growing into the Truth of Teaching
Truth is a slippery little bugger. As soon as someone tells me they have the truth about something I get suspicious. Yet the truth is (are you now suitably suspicious?!) that each of us comes to certain understandings and insights regarding teaching that just seem so right, so analytically consistent, and so confirmed by our experiences that describing them as truthful seems entirely justified.
The truth I am talking about here is not universal truth, the grand narrative of standardized pedagogy that says that everyone should think, believe, or teach in a certain way. It is a more personal truth, one smelted and shaped in the fire of our practice so that it fits the situations we deal with every day. In some ways it is close to Polyani’s (1974) notion of implicit personal knowledge, the certainties that lurk in the dim corners of consciousness.
Over a period of time each of us develops this personal truth to the point where we depend on it and sometimes declare it. I’ve been teaching since 1970 and it’s only in the last few years that I’ve felt confident enough to do some truth telling to myself about the frustrations and fears that are always there in my work. I feel I’ve grown into the truth of my own teaching.
By growing into the truth of teaching I mean developing a trust, a sense of intuitive confidence, in the accuracy and validity of our judgments and insights. Much of my career has been spent growing into truth. Here’s some of the most important truths I’ve established for myself about teaching:
I will always feel like an impostor and will never lose the sense of amazement I feel when people treat me as if I have something valuable to offer.
I will never be able to initiate activities that keep all students engaged all the time.
Attending to my credibility at the outset of a new course is crucial so I need to watch out for my tendency to engage in too much self-deprecation.
The regular use of examples, anecdotes, and autobiographical illustrations in explaining difficult concepts is strongly appreciated by students.
Making full disclosure of my expectations and agendas is necessary if I am to establish an authentic presence in a classroom.
I always have power in the classroom and I can never be a fly on the wall withering away to the point that students don’t notice I’m in the room.
Modeling critical thinking is crucial to helping students learn it, but students will probably resist critical thinking whatever I do.
Resistance to learning is a highly predictable presence in my classrooms and its presence does not mean I’m a failure.
I have learned racist impulses and instincts and I will never lose these, though I can become more aware and struggle against them.
I cannot motivate anyone to learn if at a very basic level they don’t wish to. All I can do is try to remove whatever organizational, psychological, cultural, interpersonal, or pedagogic barriers are getting in the way of their learning, provide whatever modeling I can, build the best possible case for learning, and then cross my fingers and hope for the best.
These truths are experiential truths, confirmed repeatedly by my own analyses, colleagues’ perceptions, and students’ anonymous feedback. They have not been revealed to me in a series of Road to Damascus epiphanies, there have been no instantaneous conversions. Instead, there has been an incremental building of recognition and confidence, a growing readiness to accept that these things are true for me, Stephen Brookfield, even when they are contradicted by conventional wisdom, omitted from manuals of best practices, or denounced by authoritative experts.
What has been interesting to me is that as I have grown confident enough to speak these truths publicly I have had them confirmed by strangers. Just to take the example of the first of the truths mentioned above (my knowing that I’m an impostor), I have had countless teachers tell me that I put into words the exact feeling of impostorship that they felt. Apparently it was comforting to hear or read a supposed “expert” talk about feeling like an impostor, because it named as a universal reality something they thought was wholly idiosyncratic, only felt by them.
Being Experts on Our Own Teaching
One of the truths I want to argue for in this book is that sometimes we are the experts on our teaching. When we start to think about how to deal with the problems we face in class our instinct is to turn to classroom consultants, texts, or faculty development specialists to help us. The assumption seems to be that we will only stumble on useful insights or information for dealing with our problems by going outside of our own experience and consulting external sources.
Sometimes such resources are indeed invaluable. If I didn’t think that this book could be helpful there would be no reason to write it! But far too often many teachers view even a cursory reflection on their personal experience as essentially worthless. Their reasoning is that if they had experience that would help them to deal with the problem, then the problem wouldn’t exist anymore. I believe that the opposite is true, that the starting point for dealing with teachers’ problems should be teachers’ own experiences. The problem is that teachers don’t know how to unlock their experiences and reflect on them in a way that provides problem-solving insights.
In this regard we can learn a great deal from the ideas and practices of the adult educator, Myles Horton (Jacobs, 2003). Myles was the founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and he spent his life as an activist educator working with labor unions, the civil rights movement, and various grassroots environmental organizations. Although known chiefly for his social activism, he also worked out a theory of how to help people learn from their experience. “Helping people learn what they do” is his succinct description of how to get teachers to learn from their experiences.
When I heard Myles speak this phrase to a group of my own students in New York I was taken immediately with how it captured what I saw happening in the best kind of teacher conversation groups. In these groups people come to realize the value of sharing their own experiences with each other, they help each other take a critical perspective on these, and they learn how to use this reflection to help them deal with whatever problems they face. As I work to get teachers to take their own experiences seriously, Myles’ words are always at the front of my mind.
Of course, experience can sometimes be a terrible teacher. Simply having experiences does not imply that they are reflected on, understood, or analyzed critically. Individual experiences can be distorted, self-fulfilling, unexamined, and constraining. In fact, it is a mistake to think that we have experiences in the sense that our own being stands alone while the river of experience flows around us. Events happen to us but experiences—the meanings we grant to how we understand events—are constructed by us as we make sense of these events.
