Academic Affairs

In this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Max Clio (the pseudonym of a Big-Ten historian) writes about “teaching styles“. Basically, his point is that we spend a lot of time studying and understanding students’ learning styles, but shouldn’t we also be interested in the variety of teaching styles among faculty. His point of reference is that each semester he assigns a book that he hasn’t read. The result, for him, is the excitement of discovering a text along with his students.

This immediately brought be back to my days in the classroom. I used to team teach a course in minority voices with a colleague of mine in the communication department. My style was loose and fluid (and not a little clumsy at times). I’d never teach with more that a page of notes. A beginning and an end. I didn’t know the path we’d take to get there, but I had confidence we would reach the point I needed to make in the class.

My colleague charted her path with meticulous detail. Her lectures were an elegant road map that took us point by point to the conclusion she needed to make. Her lectures were always a discovery for me, and equally effective in engaging the students in the topic.

We learned very quickly that our teaching styles wouldn’t work for the other. When one of us was primary during a particular class period, we did it our own way. When we were up there together–which was most of the time–we developed an approach that blended our teaching styles. And we learned from each other.

A commitment to teaching is a commitment to lifelong learning. And it’s not just content I’m talking about here. Learning about my colleague’s approach to teaching forever influenced my own pedagogical techniques. And even though I’m less frequently in the classroom these days, I still attend to my teaching. I still love the thrill that comes from a great class, and I still love the excitement that comes from knowing where I want to get to with only a slight notion of how I’m going to get there.

Tags: teaching //