My teaching approach (with student comments in quotes)

My general approach to teaching is definitely not standard, and I confess that I like to keep students on the edge of their seats. Some of that comes from my own fitfulness, but some of that comes from remembering what it felt like to be cooped up in a lecture hall with nothing to keep me awake—least of all, a lecture that sounded far too much like the textbook I could read in the comfort of my dorm room. I’d like students to feel that bewilderment that all researchers do when first approaching a problem. I want students to feel like they learn, but I do want them to feel how challenging the topic is…because otherwise, I’m not sure why they’d care about what they learn if it didn’t answer some fairly large and imposing questions.

So, I feel successful when students notice that:

“Lecture really went outside of book & kept it interesting.”

I like to teach in a way that really invites students to reach out and make the stuff their own. So, it’s hard to be a passive learner in my classroom, and the lecture will really ask students to think along with me and build the story with me, but that’s all of a piece with my idea (see other page) that the uptake of information has everything to do with your own actions. I really don’t like any sort of teaching that offers information as just another set of data to be entered into a mental hard drive.

Because I do value keeping you on the edge of your seats, wondering what’s going to happen next, sometimes you are learning even when you’re not always sure what you’re learning. Some people don’t notice they’ve learned until it’s “too late”:

“That man fooled me—I didn’t realize how much I was learning!” (Realizing what you've learned in retrospect can sometimes be a common theme...and I'd take blame for the delay, except for the fact that some lessons apply much better in the real world and resonate only shallowly amidst the classroom walls.)

We can and do slow down and take stock of where we’ve gone, but the answers aren’t simple, and sometimes the best sign of learning is that you find new questions. That might just feel like more confusion, but having learned some things myself, I find that I don’t feel any more satisfied or complacent. Really, all that has changed is that I have new questions as I keep at learning. And that’s something I really struggle with: how to keep class interesting while also keeping students feeling like they have somewhere further to go still. I don’t really want to teach satisfaction or complacency, and I do want students to learn the scholarly joys of struggling with a challenging and fascinating research problem.

Back to General Approach/Intro or back to In the Classroom