Tuesday, May 6, 2014

How to teach

Rebecca Schuman gives good advice about deskside manner here. Relatedly, the Daily Nous links to an article that encourages:
professors who “made me excited about learning,” “cared about me as a person,” or “encouraged my hopes and dreams.”  
Making students excited about learning what you teach seems both good and a good sign. It suggests that you actually care enough about it to convey this to students, and even to infect them with it.

I'm less sure about caring about students as people. They are people, and professors who neither recognize this fact nor care accordingly are doing something wrong. But surely our job is primarily to care about them as students, not as people. Professors' relationships with their students should be professional, which does not mean heartless, I would think.

And as for encouraging hopes and dreams, I think I disagree. The last students I talked to about their hopes and dreams wanted to go into academia and did not want to hear that this was a bad idea. I didn't press the issue, but I don't think that encouraging hopes and dreams that cannot equally be described as realistic plans does anyone any favors.

The article I quoted above also says that:
Graduates who had done a long-term project that took a semester or more, who had held an internship, or who were extremely involved in extracurricular activities or organizations had twice the odds of being engaged at work and an edge in thriving in well-being.
But later points out:
It’s not clear whether the respondents who are thriving in the workplace do so because of some internal drive, and whether that internal drive had led them to find internships, proactive mentors, or long-term projects.
So it doesn't strike me as very helpful. 

I prefer stuff like this, this, and this, although it's clearly aimed below the college level. It does at least bring out the value of repeating an activity, retrieving a memory, and reviewing material in a variety of ways. There's not much more there that isn't already obvious and that seems relevant to the teaching of philosophy, but even this is good to know. So far as science has spoken about how to teach it has not found much to say. 

12 comments:

  1. yep we know next to nada about teaching (at least the kinds that occur in higher-ed) and that should raise some serious red-flags about the enterprise but than as the nascent studies on cognitive-biases tell us most folks won't be able to process such data/discoveries regardless of their own formal studies in say logic or psychology, some kluged-together buggy critters we be..
    -dmf

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    1. Yes, and it should raise red flags about any claim that we should (have to) do things differently because of what "science" or "data" has shown.

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    2. indeed, sadly that just seems to leave it up to economics...
      -dmf

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    3. Changes are likely to be market-driven, or attempts to appeal to the market. There's something to be said for resisting radical changes, though, given how little we know and how little popular methods are likely to have to do with good methods. Let teachers teach, in other words, rather than letting assessment and/or administrators tell them how to do their jobs. That doesn't seem to be the way things are going though.

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    4. I don't see any real organized resistances on the part of faculty so this may all be moot but seems that there is a third option that we turn the research resources of the universities on the practices of the university. I think it is hard to argue that the majority of students (and via them our democracies/communities) are being well served by business as usual and the coming pay to train for a job model of the Republican Parties are even more egregious. Time will tell I suppose...
      -dmf

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    5. There's not much organized resistance, no. Not all that much to resist except a slow but steady creep either. It does appear to be a creep in the wrong direction though. As you say, time will tell.

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  2. On the question of professorial encouragement, I don't think there can be no rules. It will depend on the student, whether encouragement of hopes and dreams is to beneficial or not. This might partly require seeing the students *as people*, but it will most certainly require Urteilskraft.

    But I agree, uncritical encouragement is certainly an evil, if you have students like jazz guru Branford Marsalis' students (which sometimes happens):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz2jRHA9fo#t=31

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    1. Yes, it certainly depends on the student. I'm all for encouragement in general, but less positive about dreams. The realistic spirit, roughly speaking. Marsalis seems a little too cynical, although of course I don't know his students.

      We have a former student who hopes to fly to Mars. If selected she would not come back. Everyone seems to think that it is just great that she might achieve this dream and make a name for herself. I'm not sure that this kind of hope/dream (which is actually realistic in her case--she made it to round two of the selection process) should be encouraged. Perhaps it should be. But not uncritically or without thought.

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    2. cmon—she might come back! from the future! with martians!

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    3. That would be awesome! What was I thinking?

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    4. about your student, like a chump, when you could have been thinking about humanity and its possibly awesome future.

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