What Works: Listen, Guide, Explore, Experiment
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I am Paul Duff. I am a Professor of Religion and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the Columbian College. What works for me, well there are two things. One is me, if I’m relaxed I am much better in the classroom, and I think because of my job the Dean’s office I am much more relaxed in the classroom because it’s kind of a break from the stress of the day. The other thing is, I have to continually remind myself to not talk. We are usually dealing with texts; we are usually dealing with ancient texts. And what I find effective is just to have students slug through them. and It’s painfully slow, and there is stuff that you think they should get right away and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. And you just have to let them work through it. I mean if I’m trying to teach them critical reading skills, which I am, and critical thinking skills, they need the opportunity to practice. And so in a classroom, it is an environment in which I have control. I can kind of let them practice in a productive way. But the impulse is always to cover ground, and have them stop talking so I can talk more and get through what we’re supposed to get through this day on the syllabus. I think if anything is worth, it’s just been that I have been able to suppress that urge to talk. And they certainly want to hear something from me and they want me to guide the discussion. But they need to do it themselves and I ask them to come to class prepared to work and they do.
The courses I am teaching now are all WID courses and so I explain to them at the beginning that I see writing in two ways, one they are going to learn how to write academic prose that is clear. Two I want them to write to learn as well, I want them to understand that writing is a way that they can kind of nail ideas down. So when they come in I usually give them a question and ask them to write for five minutes, its usually not a particularly complicated question and this kind of provides a little transition so that they can quiet down, s get into the mode of what they are going to be doing in class. And then we talk about the question for a few minutes. If the question is focused on what we are going to be doing that day we just kind of go from there. If it is less focused, then we will usually turn to a particular text, this semester we are studying apocalypses. So we will be reading first Enoch or something, so we will go to first Enoch. I will usually begin with some fairly easy questions to get them thinking, you know what struck you about this text that is different from the other apocalypses we have read, or what is similar to the other apocalypses. I really don’t care what they say I just want them to start talking. And then I’ll try to focus the questions more and more, so that we are getting down to something more substantive. And then I’ll usually, if we have time, I mean sometimes we’re covering a text a day, which doesn’t give you much time. If we’re looking at a text over the period of a week or so or two weeks, We’ll go to the text and I’ll try to work through sections of it with them. So I’ll read it usually, and I’ll say, okay now whats going on here, does this sound like to anything else we’ve read this semester. Those kinds of things, and just kind of wait for them to talk. And usually if you allow them to talk if you don’t embarrass them, by saying, no, no that’s not right. But rather kind of gently guide them toward the answer they are very responsive. In fact at times its hard to get them to stop. Ok folks its time to move on a little bit, we want to look at the next paragraph. They have it in them and they like to talk, they like to think about this stuff. One thing that I’ve also done in class, that has worked, and I just did this on kind of a whim. This was a class that I was teaching last semester and it’s a pretty difficult class.
There are competing theories, and there is no consensus, there are a couple of different consensi, if that’s possible. And I was having them read texts that presented different points of view because I wanted them to see the range of scholarly opinion, I didn’t want to direct them to this particular way of thinking or this particular way of thinking. I wanted them to really dig into that, so I set up outside groups. I broke them down into groups of I think five or six, there were thirty in the class. And I said ok this is what you need to do, you need to meet outside of class for one hour, four times over the semester, and the first time has got to be between you know sept 15 and oct 15 so they didn’t all do it the last week of class. And what I want you to do is I want you to talk about what we are doing in class. And I want you to simply give me at the end of the semester a one page summary of what went on, and tell me who didn’t show up. That’s really all I wanted of them. And I thought with group work its kind of hit or miss, sometimes three of the five groups will work, sometimes four of the five groups will work, sometimes none of the groups will work. This worked tremendously, and in fact students invited me to their group meetings, they were meeting every week. It was great, it was just really great. So I am trying that again this semester, I don’t know how it will work. I just think you just have to be willing to try new things, and be willing to fail. And be open with the students, say at the beginning of last semester when I was setting up the external groups I said, I have never tried this before, but lets see if it works. You know if it doesn’t, it doesn’t and you have laid all the cards out on the table they know that it is an experiment its up them as well as up to you, and we’ll see.
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