The Teaching Professor

Introductory courses are packed with content. Teachers struggle to get through it during class; students struggle to master it outside of class. Too often learning consists of memorizing material that’s used on the exam but not retained long after. Faculty know they should use more strategies that engage students, but those approaches take time and, in most courses, that’s in very short supply. Blended-learning designs can be used to help with the problem.

Today’s college instructors are expected not only to be engaging in their classes, but to engage students outside the classroom. Whether it’s supervising service-learning, taking students to professional conferences, leading study sessions in coffee houses, or inviting students into our homes, faculty are now expected to be with students in ways that change the kinds of relationships teachers and students have in the classroom. Teachers now interact with their students in a variety of contexts, many of them informal and some of them purely social. These new roles blur the line between being friendly toward students and being a friend of students. This matters whether you’ve been teaching for a while and no longer look like a student or whether your academic career is just starting. All faculty need to know how to build supportive and positive, but businesslike, relationships with students.

My students have taught me some invaluable lessons during my first two years as a college professor. I’d like to share three of the most important ones here. They aren’t new lessons and I didn’t use any unique methods to learn them. I collected data midsemester from students, I talked with them, and I looked closely at what was happening in my classroom. The lessons were there for me to learn, and taken together they have helped me think more clearly about what I want my students to know and do, and who I want them to become. They are lessons that have made me a better teacher.

Motivation—there are two kinds: intrinsic, which involves doing something because we want to do it, and extrinsic, which is doing something because we have to do it. A negative relationship exists between the two. Extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation. Students won’t be attending class because they want to if attending class is required. As a result of this negative relationship, students don’t have much intrinsic motivation because it’s been beaten out of them by most extrinsic educational experiences. And that’s a nutshell version of how most teachers understand motivation.

The body of evidence documenting the effectiveness of cooperative learning is already impressive. The new research highlighted here looked at a small but important variable not controlled in much of the previous work: time on task. 

Faculty are taking a variety of approaches to getting students doing the required preparation before they come to class, and this article proposes yet another approach. It was developed to support a series of business courses being taught using team-based learning. Many of the in-class activities being used required knowledge contained in assigned readings students found challenging. To support student efforts to prepare, course coordinators prepared short (less than 10 minutes) “supportive” podcasts “to annotate and critically review compulsory reading material (assigned from academic journals, textbooks, and/or media).”

Before returning to the classroom after 20-plus years in academic administration, I used to tease my spouse about all the effort she put into grading finals. From the moment they were turned in until the grades were due, she would work nonstop on grading. Why make all that effort when many students would never get to the comments if they got their semester grades first and they were what they wanted or expected? At that point they were ready to move on to whatever was next in their lives and cared little about her careful comments. But when I went back to teaching, the joke was on me. Now I had to figure out a way to make the final and its feedback meaningful for students.