What does it mean to teach?

The Basics

No prep work beyond your lived experience as an educator — as a professor, instructor, tutor, coach, advisor, or in any other formal or informal role as an educator — is required. You will be well prepared to contribute to and get something from the dialogue if all you do is show up ready for participating in vigorous conversation. Bringing something to take notes with would probably be a good idea. If you're inclined to prepare by jotting down some ideas or questions, doing some reading, or priming your thinking in some other way please do, but you'll be fine if you don't. Curiosity and a willingness to engage are the most important things.

Follow-up links about concepts that arose during the Friday, February 8 conversation:

• Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset Google Doc
• A document, created by University of Richmond Prof. Joe Boehman, that briefly describes student-development theories including Sanford's Theory of Challenge and Support

Brief Dialogue 1 Synopsis

Ten folks showed up for this week's first chat, on February 5. Six showed up (and three sent weather-based regrets) for the second session, on Thursday. Nine people were at Friday's conversation; two more were on their way to join us but got misled by some unfortunately placed DO NOT ENTER signs.

Dialogue participants represented multiple STEM, social-science, humanities, and other fields. They included tenured professors with nearly 40 years of teaching experience, department and program heads, almost brand-new non-tenure-line instructors with various types and amounts of life experience, staff folks who teach at least as much as most professors and instructors do, and people who don't yet teach but plan to. Most of us were born and educated in the United States, but a significant number of us, in relation to campus demographics, weren't.

Our conversations went in a lot of directions. That was expected. "What does it mean to teach?" is not a question that can be answered. It can only really be responded to. Sometimes we stayed tightly on that topic and tried to really get at what it means to each of us to teach. Most often we tried to make sense of what the questions asks by responding indirectly: by describing experiences we've had as teachers, students, parents, and human beings; by responding to and building on each other's descriptions, observations, and questions; by sharing thoughts that initially seemed unrelated but turned out to be tightly and deeply connected to the general inquiry and the flow of ideas. The notes above show some of what we came up with.

Some perspectives and feelings came up in every conversation and seemed to resonate with all of us:

• Any attempt to figure out what it means to teach requires also figuring out what it means to learn.
• We are products of academic systems that define "teaching" as a didactic process in which "experts" convey information to subordinate people — students — who are supposed to accept it then regurgitate it on demand.
• The stories those systems perpetuate and depend on heavily influence our perspectives, insecurities, frustrations, and definitions of "success" in our own attempts to help people learn.
• If we could teach exactly as we want to, we would focus much more on a fairly messy but productive combination of challenging and supporting students than we feel or believe we have access to in our current roles.
• We are conscious of the contradiction between how we actually learned and how we feel like we have to teach.
• We don't want to tell students what to do and how to do it. We want to help fellow human beings learn how to learn and autonomously & collaboratively apply the knowledge and skills they build.
• Teaching is not about getting students to produce pristine artifacts but a lot of us feel like that's what we have to do, partially because it's what students have been led to believe evidence of learning looks like.
• A big part of helping students learn to learn is helping them unlearn misconceptions they arrive to us deeply believing.