What the Best College Teachers Do...

I should have been writing the yesterday (I did a little but didn't make my pages) but I got hooked on this book that I started the other day. In reading it, I realized it has been a long time since I've read a book slowly. I enjoyed just enjoying this book--rereading sentences, marking favorite lines, and having a good conversation in the margins. This book is repetitive and preaches to the choir (you have to agree to the goal of student-learning to really enjoy this book I think), and the end, for me, went in a direction that I can't really act on right now. But overall, I truly enjoyed this study and it really motivated me to redo my syllabi for the fall and to rethink my course assignments and exams. After I finished the book last night, I printed out my syllabi for the fall, got out my pen, and went to work on fixing them up--for several hours. My upper level seminar got the heaviest treatment. I designed the course thinking a lot about the material that I wanted students to be exposed to, but I needed to think more about what I want students to learn. So I revised the course objectives and did an overhaul on the assignments. After the editing work, the assignments, which were already connected, build on each other even more, and should help students write a more compelling essay by the end of the semester. I also had to rethink the exam. As a general rule, I don't like exams and avoid them, but I do think a comprehensive, take-home exam would work well for this course and give them a great opportunity to put together our conversations in the course. I am thinking we will work together to design the questions for the exam and then I will select the text(s) for analysis. My intro-level course also needed some adjustments, but I've been teaching that course for a while so I feel pretty good about it's emphasis of student-learning over performance.

I definitely recommend Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do for any teacher interested in just taking some time out to think about their courses. It is not a how-to book and won't make someone instantly a better teacher, but if you are interested in hearing about how other professors emphasize learning in their classrooms, I think it is a great read. All of it is common sense information, but as the study makes clear, there are a lot of folks in academia who think the classroom is a place to show off what they know, rather than a place to encourage students to expand and grow in their own knowledge. So although I didn't get much writing done, yesterday was a really productive day for me to think about my philosophy and goals as a teacher-scholar. I am of course tempted to start in on typing up my changes to my syllabi, but I am going to work on my pages for the day first! (That will be my "treat" for finishing.)