U N I V E R S I T Y  O F  P I T T S B U R G H

Volume XI, Number 2

James Seitz, English

Photo by Joseph Kapelewski, CIDDE

As a teacher in the Humanities, I find it important to be skeptical of crafting learning outcomes that are overly precise. While it’s valuable for me to identify particular kinds of student learning I’d like to see by the end of the term, it’s equally valuable to keep my eyes open to kinds of student learning I never anticipated. One of the problems with standards-based education is that it often assumes we already know what students should achieve as a result of their schooling. To my mind, the best teachers are those who continually revise their sense of what a course can do by remaining alert to the many ways that new groups of students learn new things from the “same” material. Since students aren’t vessels, what they bring to a course is as important as what teachers bring. So an important part of my work is to look for positive student achievements I haven’t expected or listed on my syllabus.

But none of this is meant to deny how useful it can be—for me as well as my students—when I take the time to articulate what I’d like them to learn from a course. For me, this means thinking not so much about what they’ll ingest as what they’ll be able to do . When I’m designing a course, I ask myself: What kinds of reading and writing do I want students to be able to perform by the end of the term? If I want them to be able to closely analyze a poem, then I need to consider what the features of a close poetic analysis are, and how I can help prepare students not merely to recognize but to activate these features in their own writing. By thinking about outcomes in terms of performance, I find myself approaching courses more in the role of a coach—someone whose teaching is in constant interaction with how his students are performing and what they demonstrate they’ve learned to do (or can’t yet do).

The coaching metaphor reminds me to find ways to tell students not merely what I’m asking them to do but also how they can move toward actually doing it. So, for example, when a student turns in an essay that lacks coherence, I have to do more than identify this failure; I have to offer avenues—usually in the form of questions and possibilities—that can lead the student toward a different result, much as a coach will help an athlete consider specific changes that can improve performance. Coaches also encourage their players—they’re alert to the psychology of motivation—and I find it important to remind students that I believe in their potential, whatever the struggles they may encounter during the term.

My syllabi include a section that states my goals for the course in terms of what abilities I want to help students develop during the semester. The language of “abilities” and “development” is important here: I want students to recognize that abilities can always be further developed. Since students enter a course with different sets and levels of skill, my goal is to push all of them to progress, rather than set the same static marker of achievement for everyone. I try to avoid “teaching to the middle,” which leaves out students at the advanced or under-prepared ends of the spectrum. We discuss this on the first day of class and in individual conferences at midterm, so that students have a clear sense of how and why I hope to challenge them.

Once again, the “how” behind the challenge is especially vital to me. Relatively quickly, I want students to have a clear sense of the difference between the work I’m requiring and the work they’ve entered the course ready to produce. This usually becomes clear through my responses to their writing—writing that may be proficient in certain ways but that often lacks the degree of critical thinking we value in a university. If I can help them see what such critical thinking looks like, they gain a sense of the road they need to travel in order to meet the challenge of the course. And because most of our students at Pitt are ambitious, I find that most of them work hard to do so.

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