Finding a Light

By James M. Lang

As a Grateful Dead fan who likes to quote from rock songs more than a college professor should, I've often had to resist citing that overused Dead lyric about finding the light in the strangest of places. I'm trying to resist quoting it in this month's column, too, after finding a little light about teaching from an unexpected source.

You can chalk it up to bias, since I prefer to publish in conventional channels, but the last place I expect to find insights is in one of the self-published books or essays about teaching that people have been sending me ever since the inception of this column.

Last month, though, a short, self-published book about teaching arrived in a manila envelope in my office mailbox, and I flipped through it while waiting for my laptop to install some new software. Sheer genius didn't shoot off the page at me, but the writing style was folksy and pleasant, and even a few paragraphs revealed that the writer was someone who not only cared deeply about teaching, but also had spent a career thinking about it and taking it seriously.

So I kept flipping. An hour or two later, having read the book through, I noted with a sigh that my office-cleaning project, now 15 months overdue, would have to wait one more day.

I'm dedicating this month's column to passing along a few gems that I found most illuminating in Tips and Thoughts on Improving the Teaching Process in College: A Personal Diary, a self-published book by Joe Ben Hoyle, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Richmond. He has posted the book on his Web site as well.

If the advice I'm citing from him seems a little disjointed, the blame lies with me, not Joe. I've excerpted five tips here out of the 34 in his book, each of which comes wrapped in a pleasing package of anecdote and example. I tried to identify tips that would have special relevance for where we as faculty members find ourselves now: early in the semester, still fresh, and probably much engaged with our courses and students.

Teaching as a Dance. I'm always searching for fresh language and methods that I can use to convince students that they should participate not solely to boost their grades, but also because their ideas and responses to the course material are an integral part of the learning we all have to do together. The first idea I picked up from Joe was a new way to think about that, and to speak with students about it.

"On the first day of classes," Joe writes, "I talk to my students about learning to dance." Then he describes the relevance of that explanation for their time together in the classroom: "We are partners. I will furnish half the effort but they must put in the other half if we are to succeed. As the teacher, I lead, but that is just a portion of my 50 percent. I pledge to do my share but they are absolutely responsible for their part."

I love the language here, which signals to the students that the teaching and learning transaction requires two minds working together, that it can be a joyful process (like dancing!), and that inattention on their part means the class simply can't succeed.

Class Preparation. Joe has developed his own method for inspiring students to participate in his class discussions and activities: He passes out the discussion questions at least one class period in advance of the conversation.

I like that technique, first, because it gives students plenty of time to think about their responses before they are put on the spot in public. So much silent time in class discussions stems from an understandable fact: We ask students complex questions that arise from our deep-seated interest in our disciplines, and then we expect them to walk in from lunch and conversations about the weekend and spit out an intelligible answer at a moment's notice.

But in addition to the benefit of allowing students time to construct more thoughtful responses, the technique also helps students direct their reading and study time. The questions obviously signal to them what matters, and students can use the questions -- and their responses -- to structure their study notes.

Seating Charts. The third tip I liked was one designed to combat what Joe calls the "comfort slump." In the first few weeks of a new semester, he explains, students tend to be more tense about the course, uncertain what each class period will bring, or what each new assignment might require of them. But eventually the routines and expectations become familiar, and -- in Joe's experience -- "preparation often begins to slide and involvement in class is not as sharp. . . . The quality of the educational process falls off as students settle into a recognized routine."

To combat that, Joe uses a seating chart. On the first day of the semester, students are assigned specific seats, a strategy he uses to help him learn names. But as soon as he senses the comfort slump setting in, he passes out a new seating chart.

The result: "Students are yanked from the safety of their homes. Individuals on the back row are now directly in front of me, surrounded by a new group of peers. Students who chat with their friends are moved away from the temptation. Their comfort zone is destroyed. A little bit of the freshness and tension of the first weeks of class returns and students again become better prepared and more alert."

That strategy might not work for everyone. It would prove logistically challenging in large classes, and some faculty members might dismiss the idea as grade-schoolish. But Joe swears by it, and I'm all for any strategy that might inject new life into the semester after a month or two have gone by.

The Wisdom of A Students. At the end of a semester, Joe e-mails students who have earned an A in his course with a note of congratulations. "I ask each A student to do me a favor and write a paragraph or two describing how he or she managed to earn the grade of A when so many other equally bright students did not," he explains. "They are told (as they should already know) that these messages will be passed along verbatim to the next group of students in this same class."

At the beginning of the next semester, Joe hands out a compilation of those responses to new students in the same course, offering advice from their predecessors on how to succeed. Not only do the students get good advice, but Joe does, too. If he reads that a student earned an A by skipping class and cramming the night before each major exam, he knows that means he had better rethink what he's doing.

Talking Outside of Class. Joe offers teachers a piece of advice that strikes me as both pedagogically sound and just plain full of human decency: "Create some easy opportunities for student conversations" -- outside of class. State on your syllabus, for example, that you will eat lunch in the student center once a week, and that you welcome visitors to come and chat about the course, or about anything else that's on their minds.

His reasoning seems right to me. Behind our desks and our books, we can seem like distant and parental figures. We don't necessarily want friendships with our students, but we should want them to see us as adults with a passion for thinking and learning and talking about our disciplines. When they see us in that light, and form connections with us as human beings, it might motivate them to become more invested in our courses and disciplines.

Some version of that dynamic happened with me as I read Joe's book. I felt like I got to know someone worth knowing, and the teaching advice that he imparted did not crash down upon me like pronouncements from on high. It came in the form of well-intentioned words of wisdom from a senior colleague who wanted to help me -- and my students -- succeed.

Oh, all right, I can't help myself. The lyric is from "Scarlet Begonias," and it goes like this: "Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right."

Thanks for a little light, Joe.