Attitude of Gratitude #18: Colleagues Keep Me Afloat

My colleague wrote eloquently about the seasonal "Eeyore Days" that happen in November. I, too, experience the malaise she describes, right after Spring Break, too. 

I haven't quite got to the point where I'm so behind that all I want to do is weep, a typical feature of every semester. It's during those time of the year I particularly lean on my peers for support. 

Which brings me to the question for today's attitude of gratitude blog challenge question: What do you appreciate about your colleagues? In a word: Lots!

Knowing I'm not the only one struggling, falling behind on grading, or feeling frustrated with a particular teaching issue reassures me, reduces the social isolation. While I love the autonomy of my own classroom, camaraderie helps to know what I experiencing isn't unique. This collegiality, at least for me, is therapeutic.

My peers' intellectual generosity also energizes me, makes me a better teacher. Not a week goes by when I don't "steal" or hack a lesson plan from a colleague. And the feedback I get on how to solve teaching problems is invaluable. 

Yesterday, three of us ventilated about the ongoing process of balancing our role as gatekeepers (determining if students are ready for the next level of English) and cheerleaders (nurturing and encouraging student voices).  But instead of wallowing or complaining, they came up with the idea to meeting over the break to chat about what we can say in our syllabi and do in our classes to help make that balance more transparent. 

Our goal isn't to devise a rigid, official statement of expectations but to help make clear our role to students. Each group, students and teachers, have different sets assumptions about learning and our respective roles in the learning process. (Sidebar: Yes, I'm cribbing my notes from Rebecca Cox's  The College Fear Factor.)

I'm happy my peers are the kind of folks who'd like to spend time together to solve shared problems. I feel like part of a team. Feels the best times I had in graduate school. 

I'm also grateful for my morning commute with with a colleague/friend, a counselor and professor who teachers personal development. Sharing about learning objectives and what goes on in our classroom with him helps me see with a new set of eyes what I experience. As we spend time sipping coffee and maneuvering traffic, we informally discuss navigating the pitfalls of being educators from our respective departments. I get to take advantage of the lenses his discipline uses to approach teaching and learning. The caffeine and discussion equally invigorate.

How wonderful to know I'm on the same journey with folks in my own departments and those in other divisions. More importantly, how wonderful that we can, if we are willing, depend on each other to become more effective designers of educational experiences.

Intellectual generosity. Therapeutic goodies. Gotta ask the folks at human resources if my insurance covers my peers' billable hours - for services rendered!

Attitude of Gratitude #6: An Inspiring Quote, Levels of Clarity

The question for today's #reflectiveteacher blog prompt asks me to share and discuss a quote that inspires me. The quote I picked is by a professor at UC Berkeley: 

". . .if you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself" - John Searle  

Searle's words challenge me to know my material well enough to express myself with clarity, to say it plainly. His words remind me that what I take for granted can sound like gibberish to students.

The phrase "say it" isn't just about speaking; it's about any form of expression. It compels me to figure out new ways of iterating a point. Lately, I've been complementing the assignment prompts I give to students with short video clips. It's important that students learn how to read assignment sheets, and I could expect them to dive right into a written "genre" (assignment prompts). But far too many students are unfamiliar with unpacking assignments. So I'm experimenting with Screen Cast clips to "chunk out" the assignment or address a particular problem the assignment asks students to solve. 

This points up another aspect of being clear.  While I need to be versed in my discipline, I have to be conscious of students' mindsets, attitude, and prior knowledge. I have to infer what and how I might need to say or do in order to reach them, and then make deliberate choices to meet students where they are at. That realization too a bit of time. I thought that knowing my material was enough. 

This increased attention to clarity (both content and consciousness-of-audience) compels me to do more than repeat my message but to iterate the point in different and ways, repeated with revision. That's why I've been experimenting with different "genres" - the standard "college composition prompt" vs. a series of "explainer video" clips - that attend to the same purpose: to administer an assignment. Sidebar: Explainers are supposed to be about 2 minutes long. I'm still on my learning curve as mine tend to be bit longer. Here' a link to my YouTube page. 

I've been making my thinking behind the "iterated prompts" experiment transparent to students, explaining why I use two versions to express the same content. Juxtaposing the two prompts helps students more deeply understand the assignment; one mode is bound to fill in the gaps the other misses. Contrasting the two allows us to consider how the different genres appeal to different audience with different needs and expectations. Thinking alongside me, students see more clearly the intentional choices that a writer (me!) makes when composing. The begin to recognize the gambits writers make to make the messages both clear and appealing.  


Moreover, contrasting the two prompts allows for discussion about what the composers of other college assignments (their next batch of professors!) may expect from their students. As most of my students are new to college, many first-generation college, it's my duty to make clear and help them bridge the gap between what students expect from college and what professors believe about learning (Why yes, I've just rehearsed the thesis of Rebecca Fox's College Fear Factor). 

So Searle's quote helps me understand the multiple levels of clarity I'm responsible for delivering: my content, connecting students to that content, and making visible the conventions of college (S/O to Fox, again). It has been challenging. I've had to change my own mindset from "They should step up!" to "What can I do to show them how to step up?" I use the word "showing" intentionally because for too long, I thought I could just tell them. No. I need to demonstrate with clarity how joining college means learning new conventions and rules to be part of this community. 

Building Student/Teacher Collaboration

The first definition for collaboration that appeared when I clicked on Google was "to work with another person or group in order to achieve something". In the case of student/teacher collaboration, that "something" worth achieving is substantive, meaningful learning. The ideal collaboration between students and me would mean we share the same goals. Or our goals should overlap enough that we know that whatever we are doing is related to both our objectives. 

As the teacher, I am obligated  to meet certain learning objectives (read about my metaphor for teaching). I have to help students see the relevance of those objectives and particular lessons. I'm not saying students don't need to bring a sense of purpose to our classes. They do! Often, however, those purposes are quite general, based on limited experience with college, and quite different than what we as professors have. 

Clarifying how the learning objectives I'm assigned to teach may be important to the students' lives, academic or otherwise remains largely my responsibility. That relevance may not be readily apparent to students. This is particularly true of students, first-year and first-generation college students, who aren't familiar enough with the material nor the skills we teach to know how the assigned objectives are linked to their own goals and majors, which are often hazy and undecided for first-year students. 

The same holds true for the way we work together, that is, our different expectations about the roles students and teachers play in teaching and learning. 

I'm basically rehearsing the big point of Rebecca Cox's book The College Fear Factor. Cox uses anecdotes and research to show that students and professors expectations about learning do not match. At all. Many students expect professors to be a font of knowledge who will fill their brains with data, concepts, and information.  This makes the students primary job one of a recorder, someone waiting to be imprinted with knowledge, as in, "What's the right answer?" 

Professors, the ones I respect and do my best to emulate, certainly value the type of conceptual knowledge students expect to acquire. But we are also deeply invested in procedural knowledge. We'd like to be "guides-on-the-side" who facilitate students through the process of evaluating, manipulating, and applying that conceptual knowledge. This means we see ourselves not as sentient encyclopedias full of information. instead, we see ourselves as coaches. 

That's the distinction. Students may see professors as walking Wikipedias, brimming with discreet unit of knowledge, like cash, that can be exchanged and withdrawn as if from an ATM. We see ourselves as cognitive coaches, mentors who facilitate students' skill in addressing questions and issues from our particular disciplinary lenses. This disconnect between expectations frustrates collaboration. Crossed wires short circuit working together. Cox, in College Fear Factor, argues convincingly teachers must help students see and bridge that often jarring (shocking?) gap. This  especially applies to those of us who teach incoming first-year students, students adjusting to new culture. 

This notion of relevance isn't shared in one lecture or a discrete lesson. I can't simply "tell" students the relevance or explain significance of role-stress. It isn't a singular event. When I'm at my best, I design activities that iterate the relevance of what we are doing - without me relying on a single pronouncement or directive, hallmarks of the "empty vessel" concept of education. It's on me to facilitate, in multiple ways,  students' comprehension of the gap between what they expect about learning and what the professoriate expects. Those activities, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance, make the significance of what we are doing visible in ways that a handout or glib statement ("This isn't high school!") cannot express. 

So (as I write my way to knowing my point), the kind of collaboration I aim for rests on the shared understanding of two building blocks: the relevance of the learning objectives and the roles each of has to play make that happen. Effective eachers create the conditions for students to more easily see these foundations for collaboration. It's on teachers to make those gaps visible, to make transparent the value of the learning goals and the methods we use to get meet those objectives. In many ways, my job has just as much to do with acculturation as it does with my particular content/skill area. And I'm fine with that. It's what I signed up to do.