Let's Talk about (Good) Teaching

One of my other goals for this blog is as a kind of "sounding board" for new ideas about teaching and learning. Especially because I'm an introvert, I prefer to try ideas out, to play with them, before I act on them. You can think of my teaching posts of this blog as a drawing pad where I sketch out what I believe about teaching, before I run the ideas past other people and (more importantly) before I try them out on my students.

Here's one such idea: Good teaching is teaching that changes your life.

Let me explain. I'm currently reading What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. It's one of the top books on teaching well at the college level (and there are precious few of those books to begin with. For better or worse, most pedagogy books are aimed at the K12 level).

Bain says something about how we think which I find interesting. Although we often imagine that knowledge is simply the sum total of facts about the world, Bain points out that this is not the way that good teachers think about knowledge. To them, knowledge is a great deal more complex:

We construct our sense of reality out of all the sensory input we receive, and that process begins in the crib. We see, hear, feel, smell, and taste, and we begin connecting all those sensations in our brains to build patterns of the way we think the world works . . . By the time we reach college, we have thousands of mental models, or schemas, that we use to try to understand the lectures we hear, the texts we read, and so forth (26). 

Another way to look at knowledge, as Bain defines it, is like a story. Similar to the way that the ancient Greeks told stories about Zeus's lightning bolt to explain reality, similar to the way that we Christians tell the (true) story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall to explain sin, every single one of us takes in all the sensory input we receive, all the experiences we have, and writes a story to explain it all. This story tells us what is normal in life, and it tells us what is ideal; everything we encounter is somehow integrated into the story. The story, to some degree, is real life.

Yet sometimes the stories we tell ourselves have problems, much the way that we might chalk a car's failure to start up to its dead battery, only to find out that what's really at fault is the alternator. For whatever reason, we misinterpret reality, and according to Bain, good teachers try to point us back in the right direction:

[They] "often talked about 'challenging students intellectually.' That meant they wanted to create . . . and 'expectation failure,' a situation in which existing mental models will lead to faulty expectations, causing their students to realize the problems they face in believing whatever they believe (28).

When students realize the problems with their story, Bain adds, they are able to "construct ideas" that better represent the world as it works (28).

I confess: Too often in the past, I've thought of good teachers simply pouring more facts into students' brains, simply in an easy-to-remember and interesting way (I probably have the otherwise-great book Seven Laws of the Learner to thank for this misunderstanding, since it lauded teachers who reduced factual information to nuggets and packages which students were able to grasp and remember.) But that's not really what good teaching is. It's not simply adding knowledge, it's changing the way students think about the world, and the way in which they operate in the world.

This is not my photo. Attribution here.

This is what my very best teachers did. My Milton professor changed my life, when she showed me that the story I'd always been told, that we should avoid books with "bad" morals, was faulty. One of my first graduate professors changed my life, when she showed me that the story I told about paper writing, that we simply spit out ideas about literature, without context, was faulty; now, it's hard for me to write even a blog post without contextualizing the whole thing.

A good teacher shows us the places where our story is not true to reality, and they help us rewrite it more truthfully. A good teacher shows us the places where we've been duped by an ugly idea or behavior, and they dazzle us with the beauty in the world.

Keats writes, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and Mary Oliver follows up with this oh-so-appropriate question about beauty: "And has it changed your life?"

This is the question to be asking about good teaching, the question which I want to ask about my teaching. Have I taught the students to tell their stories in a way that is more true, more beautiful? Have I changed their life?