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No single
model exits for effective teaching, and no single model defines
all great teachers. Teachers should be held accountable for the
performance of their students—along with the students
themselves. But outstanding teachers go beyond any measure of
accountability, inspiring students to set new standards of their
best. When I ask myself what makes a great teacher and how to
describe great teaching, the answer is complex. But there are a
few guiding insights that I have learned from teachers and
colleagues over the years. Based on those, I suggest the
following principles of good teaching:
First
and foremost, teaching is helping students learn for
themselves. A great teacher is an enabler. Teachers and
students work together in the learning process, and the best
teachers are those who see from the student’s viewpoint, who can
assist the student in rediscovering or recreating the great
discoveries and creations, whether of Albert Einstein or Sylvia
Plath. If one views the job of teaching as helping students to
learn, rather than filling them full of facts, one sees that the
best teacher exercises self-discipline, has a fine sense of
timing, and retains a reservoir of unexpressed thoughts. Too
many teachers, as one of my friends put it, “delude themselves
into trying to teach great truths, instead of undertaking the
much more difficult task of teaching simple truths in a great
way.”
Second,
superb teachers enjoy their subjects. I have yet to meet a
great teacher who is not nervous on the first day of class and
on most succeeding days. They are nervous because they know how
exciting their subjects are and how important, what pleasure
they give, and therefore what a challenge it is to impart that
excitement, that pleasure, that sense of discovery. Great
teachers feel inadequate to the task because they know the
enormity of the undertaking. But they love it. There is
something of the stage performer in the best teachers. Not only
are they interested and enthusiastic but they assume that their
students are as well.
Gimmicks are of little real help to the teacher, but
dramatic steps are sometimes useful to capture the attention of
students. One law professor, for example, begins his class in
professional ethics by asking students to write the obituary
that they hope might someday be printed about them. In the
process, students must ask themselves about their ethical
aspirations in order to discover how they want to be remembered.
Third,
outstanding teaching requires the firmest grasp on one’s subject
matter, but that does not mean having all the answers. Loose
ends mean questions raised, and the great teacher wants students
to leave the classroom full of questions, not answers. Our job
is not to package the facts, but to show how to pose and attack
a problem. If teaching consisted merely of pouring into
students what professors know and think, it would not be worth
the costs. What professors know and think is of no special
value until students come to know it too, not from having been
told by someone, but from having discovered it for themselves.
Fourth,
it is essential that teachers adapt their presentations to the
abilities of their students. Teachers must cultivate what one
of my former colleagues called a “layered mind,” and they must
be sure that the layer with which they are communicating is at
the level of their students’ minds at the moment.
Fifth,
teaching is a two-way proposition, no matter what the
setting—from the largest classroom to the individual tutorial.
Some teachers perform better in a large class. Others disparage
lectures with four of five hundred students on the grounds that
most students can read many times faster than a lecturer can
talk and with a higher degree of comprehension. It is true that
we may be able to read much faster than we hear, but it is not
true that most of our students read more effectively than they
listen, particularly if the lecturer is a great teacher.
One of my favorite teachers of large classes gives his
students sets of take-home questions that, as he says, “force
the students to reshape and integrate the course in a way that I
and the literature do not, and invite insights from each
student’s particular background.” As this colleague wrote,
“Teaching is like planting a lot of intellectual time bombs, the
lengths of whose fuses even the sapper does not know.” As a
result, students find themselves thinking about the questions
not just in the lecture hall, the library, or when writing a
paper, but when they are at lunch or watching a ballgame.
Sixth,
great teachers have great expectations about what their students
can do. They make large, nonnegotiable demands on their
students, asking for major commitments from them. But they are
careful to let students know what is expected of them and to be
fair and equitable. Students, like the rest of us, want to be
appreciated, and great teachers show a real interest in what
students have to say. As one great teacher put it, “Operate on
the principle that no answer to one of your questions is
uninteresting, even if it is irrelevant.”
At most colleges and universities, students are
frequently asked to evaluate their courses. I have spent much
time reading class evaluations from Indiana University, the
University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. The
evaluations were similar in mentioning the most common criteria:
organization of course material, quality and relevance of
reading assignments, and availability of instructors to
students. But must important and most consistently mentioned in
the evaluations, in both positive and negative terms, was the
attitude of instructors toward their students. Most students
are willing to forgive a lot if they believe that their teachers
are genuinely interested in them and in their learning. If that
quality is absent, few other qualities—including the teacher’s
charisma—will be of much help.
Seventh
and finally, in its most important dimension, teaching is a
process of exploring connections. In the real world, problems
do not come neatly packaged in containers called political
science, sociology, or history. The great teacher is one who
helps students integrate knowledge and make the connections
between different disciplines. Each discipline provides a set
of lenses through which to see reality. Together, they enable
students to understand the multiple facets and complexities they
will face in their professional and personal lives. The great
teacher as connector is a guide in this process.
I cannot underscore too strongly the role of teacher as
integrator. In the end, only a small part of teaching is the
transmission of information. Particularly at the university
level, most of the information taught will be outdated before
students celebrate their fifth class reunion. The teacher must
not only encourage students to think, but also offer frameworks
within which to do that thinking—frameworks that are like maps
showing the connections among seemingly disparate facts and
figures.
*Excerpted from The Courage To Inquire, Indiana
University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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