Note to self: How to have the best class ever
Apr. 26th, 2010 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lolaraincoatSo, it's all over but the grading for this semester at my weird but beloved university, and I'm sad about it, because although my graduate class (Modern Cultural History, theory and method) was wretched and the second-year undergraduate class (Latin American History, 1450 to the present) was just so-so, the fourth-year undergraduate class - a seminar on Gender, Sex, and Family in Latin American History - was amazing. Definitely, by far, the best class of my entire teaching career. I was considering flunking them all just so I could see them again next year, but that turns out to be impractical - there would be a lot of paperwork involved. Instead I'm going to write down some of what made the class work so well this time, in case some of it is reproducible:
First, some plausible but wrong explanations for the excellence of this class
It wasn't that the students, individually, were that brilliant. I have taught ...oh ... at least four, maybe as many as six, undergraduates who were better than the very best student in this particular class. And many more who were just as good as the best in this class. Actually, there were no standout students in this class - no one student was that much better than most of the others. (And there was no worst student, either, although three of them were not quite as well-prepared and capable as the rest.)
It wasn't me. I wasn't in a particularly good mood this year, I wasn't especially well prepared to teach this class, and I wasn't looking forward to teaching it when we began - in fact walking in to the classroom on the first day of September, I felt like, man, I have taught this a dozen times already, I don't wanna, who cares? And I was really engaged with team-teaching in my other two classes, especially the shiny new Cultural History class. Hah!
No, really, it wasn't me. I'm not that good a teacher. I mean, I work at it, and I'm a lot better than I was when I started, but I'm not one of those genius teachers who everyone remembers forever after. I'm a pretty good teacher, with a fair amount of experience, who gets to teach some interesting stuff.
And now some advice to myself about how to do this again next time:
It's okay not to admit everyone into the class who wants to get in to the class. We have a shortage of seats in the 4th-year seminars; I can't solve that single-handed; the class would not have worked nearly as well with students in it who were only there because they needed the fourth class, and this was their last option. The ideal mix of students - which I lucked into this time - includes Women's Studies, International Development Studies, and Latin American/Caribbean Studies majors (so make sure the seminar remains cross-listed with them) and double majors whose other major is in Pol Sci, Anthro, and Art History. Everyone should have at least some coursework in Latin American studies/history of some kind, but it doesn't have to be with me (and what a luxury that we have so many colleagues teaching Latin American area courses.)
That thing about praise working better than criticism is really, really true at this level - and not always in ways that I expected. We spent the last four weeks collectively reading and discussing the rough drafts of their seminar papers. The very first student to present one of her colleague's papers showed up with an excellent suggestion for where the author of the rough draft could find different, related research material. I interrupted - totally without meaning to - with "holy cow, that's great! what a wonderful idea!" The students in question both beamed. And, as I should have expected but didn't, all the others who led discussion of other student's work over the next three weeks went out and found new sources for their classmates as well. Sometimes this worked better than others, but it gave them all a new way to be engaged with each others' projects. More generally, I could see them all bending themselves in two to do more of what I told them was good, while they didn't always take it in when I told them something was not so good.
Letting them see the research/writing process in action worked really well. The first half of the year, we read journal articles and book chapters; the second half, they worked on their own research papers (the division wasn't quite that tidy, but that's the basic structure.) The last article we read was one of mine, which was an innovation that worked out nicely. Rather than spend too much time on the content, I walked them through the process: here's how I got the idea, here's how this idea evolved into this topic and this argument, here's how I found the documentary evidence, here's what the first draft looked like, here's what the editors said, here's what I learned from presenting this paper at conferences, here's what the editors said about the second draft, and here's what the reviews said when the book was finally published. The point, here, was to emphasize how this is a multi-stage, collective process. They kept coming back to this as they discussed each others' work, and their own: "see, I don't mind cutting out those pages, because I remember when we looked at the professor's article and she cut out a whole section!" and so on.
The collective reading/review process can demonstrate that there are many right ways to do things. I told C. he had to cut those five pages, because he had no evidence to support his argument; L. had a great idea about where he could find some evidence, instead. Again, completely without thinking it through, what came out of my mouth was "oh yeah! that's a much better solution! C., do what L. says!" Over and over again, they gave each other more and better help than I could give them alone, and it was always in the context of all of us recognizing a problem, and then coming up with many different solutions to it.
It may have helped that I was not deeply concerned with the topic of the course. Counterintuitive, but: I may have focused more clearly on the real goal of the course, which was to give the students a serious experience of historical research and writing, because I didn't care so much about teaching them anything in particular about gender history in Latin America.
Different students learn differently. Big surprise, I know. But this class was a great example of that. D.B. needed to sit in my office practicing her skills at visual analysis, over and over, with me providing lots of reassuring coaching. T. just wanted to be left alone (and probably I should have reeled him in a little earlier - that second meeting with the prof should be mandatory, not just 'strongly suggested' next time.) M. didn't know what she thought until it came out of her mouth, so if she didn't have a big group to think with, she couldn't generate her own ideas; D.P. never spoke until she was certain she had something to say and it was right, but she still got a lot out of group work; A. was distracted and unhappy working collectively, but shone when writing on his own. They all responded to different ideas, different methods, different topics. The more that the course design offered them a variety of ways to be good at something, the more students who have their chance to excel. I bet I could do more of that.
And they all want to be seen as individuals. Mostly we teach wholesale, not retail, at Spork U. But these tiny specialized fourth-year classes finally give faculty a chance to connect with the undergrads and that's great for everyone. For me, it satisfies my nosiness - I love knowing about the special mariachi-music mass at their church last week, their great-aunt's mortgage, their job in the cardboard-box factory, the Pedro Infante fan they met at the airport, and on and on - and for them, it helps them feel valued and respected as people (I hope) which makes their work both more personal (they want it to be theirs because their classmates and I know who they are)and less personal (they don't feel judged as people, I hope, when we collectively evaluate their work, because they know that as people they are already valued.)
But shared misery is way less miserable than private misery So, bizarrely, it really helped when I let it slip (once again, totally inadvertently) that I had told C. to cut all those pages, because then D.H. could say "oh, I thought it was just MY rough draft that she crossed out the whole first paragraph of!" and then everyone could compete about who had more slash marks in their drafts, and it became a mark of honor, sort of. I think S. and Z. were both a bit disappointed when they didn't have crossed-out first paragraphs to show off.
Good course design gives them both a way to understand the past in terms of their own lives and a chance to understand the past as absolutely other. So, Scheper-Hughes on mothering is all about familial relationships, and they see that in terms of their families, while it's also about weird and scary behaviors, and pushes them to understand that in very different ways. That worked! Other readings that worked in this way - Alvear-Farnsworth on factory workers, Catalina de Erauso (oddly), Klubock on mining towns, Cano on Amelio Robles and identity.
And you never know what they're going to find a connection to. So listen carefully when they start throwing ideas around about what their research papers might be. They may start out with something they think is historical, like, say, fashion magazines, or religious syncretism in Afro-Latino cultures, or women's political agency under the Unidad Popular government in Chile. It will take them a while to get to where they need to go - my great-aunt's life-long friendship with that lady she lives with! the funeral parlor down the block with the branch office in Jamaica! why my mom doesn't ever mention my grandfather!
Finally, and I already knew this, but: the step by step process for writing research papers, with undergraduates is time-consuming but so useful. They were asked to turn in a topic proposal, bibliography of secondary sources, commentary on primary sources, and rough drafts, and they showed each other some of this work and discussed it extensively in class. This made the process possible for them, when otherwise it would have been overwhelming. They all were able to do much more than they thought they could. And it made cheating much, much harder, it's worth mentioning.
My bad back was a great teaching tool. I can't sit down for more than ten minutes or so right now. So I assigned students the job of reminding me when I had to stand up. They alternated the responsibility, and many of them took to bossing me around with a certain glee. This had the effect of shifting the authority in the room a little bit in their direction (and maybe also reminding them that I'm human.) It kept the atmosphere lighter than it would have been otherwise. I'm not at all pleased about the state of my spine, but that was one way in which it was a good thing.
Mostly it was luck. It was just the right combination of students at the right time. I won't have that kind of luck again. All the rest of this is just what helped that luck along. Here's hoping that the next time I teach the class it turns out half as well.
First, some plausible but wrong explanations for the excellence of this class
It wasn't that the students, individually, were that brilliant. I have taught ...oh ... at least four, maybe as many as six, undergraduates who were better than the very best student in this particular class. And many more who were just as good as the best in this class. Actually, there were no standout students in this class - no one student was that much better than most of the others. (And there was no worst student, either, although three of them were not quite as well-prepared and capable as the rest.)
It wasn't me. I wasn't in a particularly good mood this year, I wasn't especially well prepared to teach this class, and I wasn't looking forward to teaching it when we began - in fact walking in to the classroom on the first day of September, I felt like, man, I have taught this a dozen times already, I don't wanna, who cares? And I was really engaged with team-teaching in my other two classes, especially the shiny new Cultural History class. Hah!
No, really, it wasn't me. I'm not that good a teacher. I mean, I work at it, and I'm a lot better than I was when I started, but I'm not one of those genius teachers who everyone remembers forever after. I'm a pretty good teacher, with a fair amount of experience, who gets to teach some interesting stuff.
And now some advice to myself about how to do this again next time:
It's okay not to admit everyone into the class who wants to get in to the class. We have a shortage of seats in the 4th-year seminars; I can't solve that single-handed; the class would not have worked nearly as well with students in it who were only there because they needed the fourth class, and this was their last option. The ideal mix of students - which I lucked into this time - includes Women's Studies, International Development Studies, and Latin American/Caribbean Studies majors (so make sure the seminar remains cross-listed with them) and double majors whose other major is in Pol Sci, Anthro, and Art History. Everyone should have at least some coursework in Latin American studies/history of some kind, but it doesn't have to be with me (and what a luxury that we have so many colleagues teaching Latin American area courses.)
That thing about praise working better than criticism is really, really true at this level - and not always in ways that I expected. We spent the last four weeks collectively reading and discussing the rough drafts of their seminar papers. The very first student to present one of her colleague's papers showed up with an excellent suggestion for where the author of the rough draft could find different, related research material. I interrupted - totally without meaning to - with "holy cow, that's great! what a wonderful idea!" The students in question both beamed. And, as I should have expected but didn't, all the others who led discussion of other student's work over the next three weeks went out and found new sources for their classmates as well. Sometimes this worked better than others, but it gave them all a new way to be engaged with each others' projects. More generally, I could see them all bending themselves in two to do more of what I told them was good, while they didn't always take it in when I told them something was not so good.
Letting them see the research/writing process in action worked really well. The first half of the year, we read journal articles and book chapters; the second half, they worked on their own research papers (the division wasn't quite that tidy, but that's the basic structure.) The last article we read was one of mine, which was an innovation that worked out nicely. Rather than spend too much time on the content, I walked them through the process: here's how I got the idea, here's how this idea evolved into this topic and this argument, here's how I found the documentary evidence, here's what the first draft looked like, here's what the editors said, here's what I learned from presenting this paper at conferences, here's what the editors said about the second draft, and here's what the reviews said when the book was finally published. The point, here, was to emphasize how this is a multi-stage, collective process. They kept coming back to this as they discussed each others' work, and their own: "see, I don't mind cutting out those pages, because I remember when we looked at the professor's article and she cut out a whole section!" and so on.
The collective reading/review process can demonstrate that there are many right ways to do things. I told C. he had to cut those five pages, because he had no evidence to support his argument; L. had a great idea about where he could find some evidence, instead. Again, completely without thinking it through, what came out of my mouth was "oh yeah! that's a much better solution! C., do what L. says!" Over and over again, they gave each other more and better help than I could give them alone, and it was always in the context of all of us recognizing a problem, and then coming up with many different solutions to it.
It may have helped that I was not deeply concerned with the topic of the course. Counterintuitive, but: I may have focused more clearly on the real goal of the course, which was to give the students a serious experience of historical research and writing, because I didn't care so much about teaching them anything in particular about gender history in Latin America.
Different students learn differently. Big surprise, I know. But this class was a great example of that. D.B. needed to sit in my office practicing her skills at visual analysis, over and over, with me providing lots of reassuring coaching. T. just wanted to be left alone (and probably I should have reeled him in a little earlier - that second meeting with the prof should be mandatory, not just 'strongly suggested' next time.) M. didn't know what she thought until it came out of her mouth, so if she didn't have a big group to think with, she couldn't generate her own ideas; D.P. never spoke until she was certain she had something to say and it was right, but she still got a lot out of group work; A. was distracted and unhappy working collectively, but shone when writing on his own. They all responded to different ideas, different methods, different topics. The more that the course design offered them a variety of ways to be good at something, the more students who have their chance to excel. I bet I could do more of that.
And they all want to be seen as individuals. Mostly we teach wholesale, not retail, at Spork U. But these tiny specialized fourth-year classes finally give faculty a chance to connect with the undergrads and that's great for everyone. For me, it satisfies my nosiness - I love knowing about the special mariachi-music mass at their church last week, their great-aunt's mortgage, their job in the cardboard-box factory, the Pedro Infante fan they met at the airport, and on and on - and for them, it helps them feel valued and respected as people (I hope) which makes their work both more personal (they want it to be theirs because their classmates and I know who they are)and less personal (they don't feel judged as people, I hope, when we collectively evaluate their work, because they know that as people they are already valued.)
But shared misery is way less miserable than private misery So, bizarrely, it really helped when I let it slip (once again, totally inadvertently) that I had told C. to cut all those pages, because then D.H. could say "oh, I thought it was just MY rough draft that she crossed out the whole first paragraph of!" and then everyone could compete about who had more slash marks in their drafts, and it became a mark of honor, sort of. I think S. and Z. were both a bit disappointed when they didn't have crossed-out first paragraphs to show off.
Good course design gives them both a way to understand the past in terms of their own lives and a chance to understand the past as absolutely other. So, Scheper-Hughes on mothering is all about familial relationships, and they see that in terms of their families, while it's also about weird and scary behaviors, and pushes them to understand that in very different ways. That worked! Other readings that worked in this way - Alvear-Farnsworth on factory workers, Catalina de Erauso (oddly), Klubock on mining towns, Cano on Amelio Robles and identity.
And you never know what they're going to find a connection to. So listen carefully when they start throwing ideas around about what their research papers might be. They may start out with something they think is historical, like, say, fashion magazines, or religious syncretism in Afro-Latino cultures, or women's political agency under the Unidad Popular government in Chile. It will take them a while to get to where they need to go - my great-aunt's life-long friendship with that lady she lives with! the funeral parlor down the block with the branch office in Jamaica! why my mom doesn't ever mention my grandfather!
Finally, and I already knew this, but: the step by step process for writing research papers, with undergraduates is time-consuming but so useful. They were asked to turn in a topic proposal, bibliography of secondary sources, commentary on primary sources, and rough drafts, and they showed each other some of this work and discussed it extensively in class. This made the process possible for them, when otherwise it would have been overwhelming. They all were able to do much more than they thought they could. And it made cheating much, much harder, it's worth mentioning.
My bad back was a great teaching tool. I can't sit down for more than ten minutes or so right now. So I assigned students the job of reminding me when I had to stand up. They alternated the responsibility, and many of them took to bossing me around with a certain glee. This had the effect of shifting the authority in the room a little bit in their direction (and maybe also reminding them that I'm human.) It kept the atmosphere lighter than it would have been otherwise. I'm not at all pleased about the state of my spine, but that was one way in which it was a good thing.
Mostly it was luck. It was just the right combination of students at the right time. I won't have that kind of luck again. All the rest of this is just what helped that luck along. Here's hoping that the next time I teach the class it turns out half as well.
