Review: Engaging Ideas

Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean (2^nd ed.)

I'm embarrassed that this review is so short, but it's often a problem I have when I love a book too much. I have a tendency to gush, which isn't fun to read. If you have any interest in teaching critical thinking or writing skills-- no matter what discipline you teach in--read this book!

This book is probably the most helpful book on teaching that I’ve ever read. Bean gives strategies for getting students—in classes across the curriculum—to write more (and better) and to do more critical thinking. He deals with all aspects of writing assignments, including how to respond to writing in ways that won’t take so much of the professor’s time as to make the grading oppressive. The main focus here, though, is on getting and keeping students engaged in their learning. This book is full of ideas to take into the classroom, and it’s both practical and theory-based. 5/5*

Review: Inside the Undergraduate Teaching Experience

Author: Catharine Hoffman Beyer, Edward Taylor, and Gerald M. Gillmore

Title: Inside the Undergraduate Teaching Experience: The University of Washington's Growth in Faculty Teaching Study 

Description: Researchers at the University of Washington conducted a study which examined professors’ teaching styles, specifically changes that they made to their teaching. They were especially interested in the types of changes that were made and the reasons for the changes.

Writing style: A combination of study results and anecdotes.

Audience: Anyone interested in undergraduate pedagogy.

Major ideas: The study identified a group of the best professors (based on awards for teaching); there were also randomly chosen professors in the group. Both sets change their teaching methods more than the researchers expected, with the best professors showing the most changes.

Wrap-up: This book was not a bad read, but I think I could have done as well with a well-done précis. 3/5*

Student Bashing

The recent brouhaha on WPA-l about student bashing has started me thinking. I’ll offer my thoughts here instead of there.

The background: an article in Slate has people up in arms for a few reasons: the idea that we shouldn’t assign papers; the blaming of students for what MAY be bad teaching; the (nearly constant) outlier representation of a group (in other words, most writing teachers don’t feel this way, but the cranky, outspoken ones are the ones who get the publicity).

Student bashing: On the one hand, everyone—without exception, I believe—wants/needs to vent about their work. For teachers, this includes students. We don’t always complain about students. We might also complain about other elements of our work: bosses, coworkers, bureaucracy, or the temperature of our offices. The problem comes when the medium for the complaint is a public one. We have become so used to having “conversations” with our “friends” on Facebook, Twitter, and our blogs, that we forget that these “conversations” are generally utterly public, and the whole world is listening in. (I'm not saying that the author of this article is guilty of this-- after all, it's Slate. I'm referring to most of us in the trenches.)

What to do: Everyone complains from time to time. The secret is to do it in an appropriate way. Parker Palmer claims that teaching is at an awkward intersection of public and private, and I think this is key in how we talk about our jobs. We need to resist embarrassing anyone, ever. If our rant would embarrass our boss, our employer, or, most crucially, our (generally quite vulnerable) students, it shouldn’t be public. It’s easy enough to find a friend and have coffee once a week to get this kind of venting out of our systems.

Is the kettle black? Earlier this week, I posted about a student listing “prayer” as the first step of the writing process. Was this student bashing? I didn’t think so. I thought that response was cute and funny—even clever. Every time we post about work, I guess we’re running the risk of posting inappropriately. Rather than choosing (as many do, and that’s fine) never to post about work, I try to evaluate each post. That means I’ll mess up more, but I think it’s a tradeoff—I also get to participate in more edifying conversations that way.

My .02