Modeling Critical Thinking with Online Discussions
 Click here to listen
My name is Steven Kelts, I am an assistant professor in the Political Science department and I teach mostly undergraduate courses including a special freshman program called Politics and Values. I wrote this thing once for a graduate student publication way back when called the Performative Theory of Teaching, that was just to give it a silly overly academic title, and the idea of it was, if you have passion for your subject, if you really are interested, if it turns you on in some way, if its something that you’ve decided to spend the rest of your life studying, that you can simply let that flow, almost like an actor attaches an audience to a character, a professor can attach an audience, a group of students, to that passion that he or she has for their own subject matter, and so that’s why I feel that research and teaching aren’t in competition with each other. So long as you are teaching something that you love, that you can just sort of let that flow to your students and they become intuitively, automatically excited when they see your passion for what your doing.
In one of my larger courses, I use online discussion forums, sort of as a substitute for sections with a TA, and the students actually complain about them quite a lot because its something that they have to do sort of on their own time, and it’s a written assignment each week and they’d like for them not to be there; however, I think what they don’t know is that I am able to gauge from those online assignments whether they are picking up the processes of analysis that I’m laying out in the classroom. If I use quotes from a text and I analyze in a certain way, if I sort of string quotes together and I show you that while in conjunction these two quotes that meant something sort of mundane together they can really unlock something for us that we want to understand. If they follow that same process, then in the post that they make online, that is a diagnostic for seeing that what they are actually doing is mirroring my academic performance and not just mirroring my excitement. Excitement is all well and good. I could get that as well by being like a summer blockbuster movie and having graphics and PowerPoint and stuff like that, which the students also sometimes ask for but I don’t and don’t want to use any of that stuff. I just want to do the human interaction and I want to see that they are performing the modes of analysis that I was trying to draw them into.
A trick that I've figured out is in my larger lecture classes, the same class that is online, the entire class is set up to get the students to connect these academic materials to supreme court cases that they might be interested in. When I ask them questions, I ask a series of questions all at once, I don’t simply ask for a repetition of course materials. But Instead I ask, when a question is about a supreme court cases, I ask four or five questions in a row, each of those questions getting to a deeper layer of the court case itself and hopefully if I ask the question in the right way those layers of meaning sort of mirror the layers of meaning that they can sort of get out of the texts themselves. So I ask them to make these connections, that these weren’t things that were necessarily asked in class, but through the question they can see the parallel structure of the text that they have been learning about and the case that they have been learning about.
Return to our teaching tips showcase |
