The classroom has been the central place of learning for centuries as it should be. In the classroom, students meet the disciplinary expert who has trained for many years. Imparting this knowledge and fostering expertise in succeeding semesters of students is one of the single greatest joys of teaching. After several decades of teaching, I’m grateful to be talking with and supporting former students in their current efforts. The relationships fostered in the classroom, the conferences, writing assignment feedback, hall conversations remain strong and vital. I imagine in very few occupations can relationships form such strong, lasting, and important ties.
Of 15-30 students in each class, and teaching 5 classes a semester at the beginning of the career, with 1-2 classes for reductions to free time for administrative duties in later years, I would estimate that in a thirty-year career, I have taught as many as 10,000 students in three decades. One thought persists. If I could have done a better job to deepen their learning in the minutes of class, then more of my former students would be a bit more learned, more knowledgeable, and possibly more effective in their careers and lives.
Teaching excellence is about relationships, yes, and it’s also about teaching all students as much as possible. As my former boss at Georgia’s Board of Regents said, ‘All means all, Jeff.’ So let’s take a look at some possibilities for deepening the learning of the students sitting in each class.
First, the knowledge in each discipline doubles or triples in briefer increments all the time. So let’s ease up on ourselves in the anxious desire to ‘cover all the material’ in the current textbook. We want them to learn the material, apply it, develop skills in applying the knowledge as well. In class is actually one good time to challenge students to do the necessary learning. Second, in addition to learning how to look things up, students can connect similar situations and distinguish their differences. That kind of activity is a lot more useful than memorizing a series of facts without connection or interrelationship.
So, one of the first questions to address is to identify the most important facts, skills, and attitudes for our individual courses. What is the body of knowledge for a particular course? That’s a reasonable beginning.
Frankly, the best way to teach all students is to maximize impactful learning in the minutes when we have all of them in class. That means having them use cognitive activities on course, disciplinary content during the class. Some will think but if we have them undertake exercises and activities in class, we cannot ‘cover the necessary material.’ One answer to this challenge is to employ cognitive exercises in the minutes we often neglect.
Jim Lang’s book Small Teaching(2nd ed) argues for in-class learning in this way, and he offers many examples of doing just that. By bringing more cognitive exercises into the first-5 and last-5 minutes or using intentional pauses to have students reflect, Lang encourages faculty to challenge students to think actively with course content. Similar to the flipped classroom, real learning can be deepened in class, by having students predict, retrieve, interleave, connect, practice, and self-explain. A variety of activities like the quiz, the minute paper, journaling, guided class discussions, and other writing prompts can facilitate the effectiveness of these cognitive exercises.
In my classes, I have used daily quizzes for years, but now want to return to my old quizzes to determine whether I asked of students more than mere retrieval, which is a good activity for a number of reasons. But there are others that can develop other cognitive muscles. Creating quiz questions that ask them to predict, connect, or self-explain, extend their mental activity beyond retrieval.
Creating a Small Teaching Inventory is one way to put together a broad range of activities for use during the lost minutes of class. And for the primary activities for the hour, selectively using technological tools like a course document, a course issues list, and other tools can go far to enrich the moments in class for student learning. Using student-led facilitation of discussion is vital for students taking ownership of the class and helps to decenter the class as well. More students emerge as class leaders during their facilitation.
An extension of learning in the full class, the formal conference creates individualized sessions of fifteen minutes, set up by having students submit a rough draft a day before our scheduled conference. During the conference, the student speaks first with something like ‘what I wanted to do in this essay was . . . ‘ and so on in such a way to allow me to validate their attempts in the first draft, while also drawing attention to possible next steps, a second draft, and so on. I can also see now many opportunities to employ questions that foster the cognitive activities that Lang discusses.
Books of collected essays devoted to classroom enrichment are also available. See below for a few of them that colleagues and I have produced at Emory’s Oxford College and at the Georgia Board of Regents.
