Help your students help you teach
The most important pedagogy I started to learn over 10 years teaching college students was how to help learners help me teach.
It's no secret nor a new revelation that active learners who inquire, debate, seek, problem-solve do better than passive students whose objective, in Freire's words, quietly "bank knowledge" to help them pass their next test. When I think back, my experience in elementary school was an early indicator of the importance of learner agency -- MY learner agency. My favorite parts of the day were the only ones in which students were granted agency: recess and "show and tell." I didn't have an easy time sitting in an enclosing desk for hours at a time, listening to the teacher try to teach things I already knew. I acted out. There was a precipitating incident: I threw a punch at a kid who was trying to bully me in the second grade. The problem was that he had ducked behind a glass door and I had to get stitches, then in following days go through a number of tests and interviews. It was decided that skipping the third grade might help, since they agreed that I already knew what the teacher was trying to teach me.
Fourth grade was fine. But my fifth grade teacher objected to me in general; I was both red-headed and mischievous, and a smart alec, I have to admit, but she was really mean. I hated school. I tried to ditch it and hang out in the orange grove, reading science fiction all day, but that lasted one day. Upon speaking to the principal, my parents, bless them, decided the problem wasn't me. So they transferred me to another school. When I arrived, the teacher, Mrs. Burch, took me aside and said that the class newspaper was going to press (mimeo -- ah, the smell) but needed an interview with the principal. Could I do it? I enjoyed telling the principal that I didn't need to be told how to spell "principal," and now, sixty-five years later, I still remember that mimeo publication -- "The Inkpad." Did Mrs Burch see something of the writer in me, or did that experience interest me in writing? No telling. But certainly my sense of agency had a lasting effect.
When I started teaching college students in 2005, my pedagogy began to evolve more rapidly after I confessed to one of my first classes that although I was confident about my mastery of our subject matter (what is now called "social media"), I had no training as a teacher and was, frankly, winging it. I did read a few books (the most important being Teaching as a Subversive Activity), but I truly began to learn when I enlisted my students in helping me teach. They were skeptical, of course, but I kept prodding them to talk to me about what I was asking them to do. I confessed that I was going to try a lot of things, and was going to rely on my learners to let me know candidly what worked and what didn't -- and to do it in real time, instead of saving of their critiques for end-of-term evaluations.
For example, I asked two students to volunteer to read one of the recommended (i.e., not required) texts and report to the rest of us what they felt was important. After three or four sessions, on my prodding, the overwhelming consensus was that these were fun, especially the part about teasing out one or two particularly important learnings -- but ultimately these were just old-fashioned book reports. So we decided to experiment with co-teaching (the complement to co-learning.
Each week, a team of three would engage in presentation and conversation for about 45 minutes of our three-hour class session -- about what they decided were the most important aspects of that week's texts and lectures. I encouraged them to experiment, just as I was experimenting. One team created instant messaging personae -- teen goth, middle-aged business man, troll, etc -- for AOL instant messaging, which was then popular among their cohort. Then people randomly selected roles and spent 15 minutes chatting/messaging, and tried to guess who was who. Another team created their presentation in Second Life and gave it from another room.
Co-teaching evolved over several years as students helped develop the activity. For the final few years of my teaching, we started on the first day of class. I wrote the themes of each week's texts and lectures on the whiteboards around the room. In this case, themes were "community," "public sphere," "social capital," etc. Before we talked about anything else -- even before introductions -- I asked students to gather in groups of three or four around the whiteboard themes that most attracted them, that they felt were most important to learn about. Then I asked them to engage in a round of "think-pair-share" -- an exercise I learned from Cathy Davidson (quoted below)
1. Think-Pair-Share. Approximately 5 minutes of class time; can be done at any point in a class. At some point in every class and every lecture, I use this technique I learned from a second grade teacher but have also seen in medical schools (it’s analogue is the intern surgeon’s method of “See One. Do One. Teach One.” And then I add: Share one.)
In Think-Pair-Share, you hand out index cards and pencils (this is not necessary but it somehow sets the mood fast and fast is important in TPS).
THINK: You set a timer for 90 seconds (really, 90 seconds). And you pose a question. For example, if this were a class on “Why Start With Pedagogy?” I would ask everyone to take 90 seconds to jot down three things (there are no right or wrong answers) they do in their classrooms to engage students.
PAIR: When the timer sounds, I then have students work in pairs for another 90 seconds in a very specific, ritualized way. One reads their card out loud; the other listens without interrupting. They they switch roles. Each class member then has one opportunity to speak uninterrupted and one opportunity to listen uninterrupted (an underdeveloped skill). Hearing your own voice in a classroom—and witnessing being heard—is the beginning of taking responsibility for your own learning. There is also something about the ritual of writing down, then reading to someone else, that allows the introvert to speak up in a way that avoids the panic of being called on and having to speak extemp before a group
After the pair has listened to one another, they then (still within the 90 seconds) work quickly together to edit, merge, or choose one thing they will “share,” together, with the group.
SHARE: If the group is small, I go around and have each pair read rapidly what they came up with, sticking to what is on the card, and listening to all the responses without interruption until we’ve heard from everyone. I often take notes as students read and build discussion around those points. There is always something beyond what I would have come up with on my own, always a curve ball, a surprise. In a very large lecture class, I often have a Google Doc ready and “Share” means every pair writing out their one thing on the Doc. (For more details, read Single Best Way to Transform Classrooms of Any Size.)
The think-pair-share groups that coalesced around their common interest in one of the course themes became the co-teaching group for that week. Co-teaching teams had wide latitude to experiment, but all teams added terms to the course lexicon -- a wiki where the co-teaching team added words and phrases from the texts, lectures, discussions (online and face-to-face; it was up to all of the class to fill out the definitions, add links, rearrange terms logically -- wikipedia style. Co-teaching teams created mind-maps of their module and shared them at the beginning of the next class meeting. Co-teaching teams selected three or four threads for our forum discussion and were responsible for "gardening" those discussions -- listening to what their co-learners had to say, the way I was listening out loud to what students had to say about how the course was going.