Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers
Notes
Chapter 1: Awareness
The first chapter talks about the importance of knowing yourself and knowing your students. Some key points of this chapter are:
Identity is important
Actively observe what is, and not what we hope or fear.
Be mindful of how factors such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, economic class, physical appearance, abilities, sexual orientation, and cultural background will affect our teaching.
Be aware that students are more likely to question faculty with certain characteristics, for example, faculty of color or female faculty.
Be aware that we bring preconceptions and unconscious biases into our classes, and we make assumptions before we know anything beyond physical appearance.
Learning is hard
Remember that learning in an academic setting is hard and that learning how to do something requires failing first. Productive struggle is an important part of learning.
Sitting still and listening is not an important part of learning.
Learning is not a purely intellectual exercise, emotions matter.
Know our students
Some assignments, pedagogical methods, and teaching techniques that work at one type of institution won't work at another type of school.
Effective teachers create a variety of ways to learn as much as they can about students' preparation and expectations for the class.
Know ourselves
Even if we experience pleasure and satisfaction in the academic setting, this may not be how some students are experiencing their schooling.
Lower extraversion is related to higher levels of teaching anxiety.
Understanding the role of personality characteristics allows the professor to adjust coping strategies for minimizing anxiety-provoking situations.
Being aware of who we are is an essential step to professional success.
Chapter 2: Preparation
"Planning looks different depending on your personality, your identity, the kinds of students you are teaching, and employment status". Some key points of this chapter are:
Preparation and employment status
Think about what you have to do professionally, not what you want to do. Our employment status, our departments, our job search, and so on, create boundaries around and requirements for teaching that we can't control.
Preparing to put on your professor pants
"I've come to realize that it is not so much about what students know but what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do." - P.H. Phelps.
A teacher's success not only depends on effective methods of teaching and subject knowledge but above all it depends on the strong relationships teachers develop with their students.
In order to be effective, chances are that we have to do some things that do not come naturally to us. Some SoTL calls this your teaching persona, a conscious crafting of how you present yourself as an educator.
Hallmarks of effective teaching that can be challenging: care for students and student learning, immediacy and rapport, authenticity and enthusiasm, clear communication of ideas and expectations.
Expressions of caring should be genuine, but they can be varied and should fit comfortably with your teaching persona. It really boils down to being fair and treating students with basic courtesy and respect.
If a teacher loves the content and lets that love show, that commitment and energy can cover for a lack of organization and the occasional inability to explain something clearly. Geeking out effectively in a classroom does require some performing.
Student anxiety about approaching professors is an impediment to learning.
Preparing a syllabus
Effective teachers view their syllabi as a piece of scholarship that reflects how we understand our topic and how we think it should be organized for the purpose of communicating it.
Learning objectives are the broad goals and intended purpose of a class, a program, a major, or even the university at large. They express what educators hope students will achieve during a course of study.
Learning outcomes are what students do that we can then assess and measure in order to evaluate a student's learning.
Clarify the relevance of the course material. Why this specific group of students should learn this? A concrete real-world reason.
We must specify how students will demonstrate/prove they've learned. What assignments, tests, or projects will document their learning? How? And how will you assess it?
Preparing to assess and grade student learning
Knowledge and good grades don't automatically go hand in hand.
Make assignments that you want to grade.
Make low-stakes assignments that are required but not graded, or accounting for only a small portion of grades.
When grading: be transparent, give actionable feedback, give constructive criticism and positive feedback, space out assessments as much as possible, return graded work within seven to ten days.
Preparing for the first and last day
Treat the first day as the most important class of the semester.
Deliberately plan for orchestrating first impressions, whetting students' appetites for course content, and even reassuring students about their decision to take this class.
First class: plan carefully for the first day, plan to use the whole class time, don't go over the syllabus in detail, consider ice-breaking activities, ask students what they want to learn in this class, ask students to write a short anonymous reaction to the first day.
Whatever is going to help us create a sense of accomplishment and closure is what we should do on the last day of class.
Preparing for class meetings
Don't use endless power point presentations.
Expect resistance for any technique that differs from traditional teaching.
The one who does the work does the learning.
Preparing for conflicts and confrontations
The most productive way for faculty to handle conflicts with students depends first and foremost on the faculty member's ability to communicate with students.
Some conflict is unavoidable but we can make any conflict with a student worse by acting defensively, retaliating, humiliating the student, or denying the problem.
To resolve disputes effectively we need to involve students in discussions that convey respect and empathy.
Carefully explaining policies early in the course, maximizing the objectivity of grading and policies early in the course, maximizing the objectivity of grading and exams, and instituting policies that minimize the need to evaluate the legitimacy of students' excuses are likely to be helpful in reducing conflict with our students.
Chapter 3: Reflection
"It's one of the most vicious ironies of academic job insecurity that teaching efficacy is crucial to being rehired every term, yet the best way to learn how to be an effective teacher requires the opportunity to reflect on and learn from experience. "
Student evaluations of teaching (SET)
The more we can help students value and understand the role of their feedback, the more likely it is that our SET will yield actionable feedback.
The research agrees upon three specific actionable steps to fostering constructive SETs in most teaching contexts:
Solicit SET using a variety of methods frequently throughout the term.
Read and reflect on summative student evaluations of teaching with another person.
Collect feedback on teaching from as many sources as possible.
GINs, SET, and student perception of teaching
If students perceive us as unapproachable then we are unapproachable, no matter how much we feel like students should be able to approach us.
If they don't understand your expectations, no matter how clearly to your own mind you've explained your expectations, you've communicated ineffectively.
We have to practice awareness and preparation for SET assiduously.
Across many types of classes, student populations, disciplines, and instructors, when professors provide their students with clear, consistently implemented information about assignments and grading, their evaluations improve.
Reflective pedagogical practices
Make notes and comments on a copy of our syllabus after class meetings, while grading assignments, and after student interactions.
Keep notes, keep a teaching journal.
GINs and gratitude
Gratitude can be incorporated into scholarly, reflective pedagogy, and instructors who do it regularly see practical, concrete results such as improving our teaching efficacy, increasing student learning, and decreasing teaching-related stress and burnout.
Preventing burnout with reflection and action is a process we have to create for ourselves because in most day-to-day ways, college teaching can be an isolating experience.
Chapter 4: Support
Teaching centers, peers, and mentors
Campus center for teaching and learning (CTL). Staff can provide services ranging from individual syllabus consultations and class visitations to department consultations and campus workshops. Productive usage and management of SET, including administering midterm evaluations and discussing possible course adjustments, eliciting other types of feedback from students, and helping us respond effectively to and providing dispassionate outside perspective on summative SET.
We need to uphold standards of teaching in the same way we uphold standards of scholarship, which means being willing to point out when certain practices are not good enough. The purpose is not to rate other teachers or pedagogical theories, but to help instructors improve and teach more effectively.
If we can break out of our self-imposed isolation, we may be able to work with colleagues to create systems of feedback and support for teaching and learning. You can't do this on your own.
Co-teaching or team teaching with a trusted colleague can be one of the best ways to keep learning how to be an effective teacher.
SoTL publications and conferences
There's always something new to think about -a technique, a theory about learning, a new technology tool - and perhaps incorporate into our teaching, particularly if we cultivate a beginner's mind.
In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the investigative process. But in one's teaching, a "problem" is something you don't want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in their research is an invitation, asking about a problem about one's teaching would probably seem like an accusation. What SoTL can achieve is changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation.
Just like published SoTL, conferences and professional presentations about teaching and learning can be resources for improving our teaching.
Chapter 5: Practice
The importance of practice
Nothing will improve our teaching and increase our students' learning more than doing it.
Experience is no guarantor of efficacy. Practice without awareness, feedback, reflection, and support cannot advance knowledge or ability.
We also need lots of practice to understand ourselves as teachers.
Teaching is hard
There is no way to learn how to do something really well without making mistakes in the process.
Effective teaching is emotionally taxing as well as both physically and psychically tiring. Recognizing the tiring aspects of teaching demonstrates that we are paying attention, preparing ourselves, and reflecting on our experiences.
Sometimes feeling demoralized and disappointed is inevitable when we want to be effective teachers and we are paying attention to what's happening and we are reflecting on it.
Many of the fruits of our labor won't be readily evident to us. We will never fully know the extent to which we may have successfully fostered student learning.
Approaching teaching as an intellectual challenge will not only reap rewards in terms of increased skills but will also make us less anxious, less nervous, less afraid that we won't measure up, and thus better enable us to cultivate our own self-efficacy in the classroom and during interactions with students.