Know Your Students (What the Best College Teachers Do)

Because my blogging is meant to be less authoritative discourse, more a "testing out" or conversation about good ideas online, one thing that I want to do is blog through books I'm reading, much the way that I might talk through these books with a good friend over a glass of wine.

Right now (as you know) I'm reading What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. I'm finding it excellent. I can hardly read a page without underlining something. So it seems like a good one to blog through, to record and share with others.

In this first chapter, Bain draws a sharp distinction between what he calls "strategic learners" and what might be called "deep learners" or "true learners." According to Bain, strategic learners are those who care most about "doing well in school, avoiding any challenges that will harm their academic performance and record, and often failing to develop deep understandings." (34).

This is a disastrous attitude.
Bain notes that such students will "learn for the text and then quickly expunge the material to make room for something else" (40) - a kind of "bulimic learning," if you will. Robert de Beaugrande adds: "'Bulimic education' force-feeds the learner with a feast of 'facts' which are to be memorized and used for certain narrowly defined tasks, each leading to a single 'right answer' already decided by teacher or textbook. After this use, the facts are 'purged' to make room for the next feeding" (qtd Bain 41).

I think of my students when I read this passage. I tell them that English is the best subject to learn, since there is no single right answer. They insist that this is what makes it one of hardest subjects to study. No matter how poorly they perform at math, they prefer that it has only a "single right answer". They like to be told what is right and what is wrong. Only then do they feel they've really learned.

I find this a fascinating tendency. Where does this intellectual love affair with "facts" come from? When students insist that facts are what makes an argument persuasive, why do they distrust logical reasoning? What do they mean by "facts" or "a single right answer?"

But ultimately, as a teacher I don't want to blame students for their attitude. Indeed, Bain does not write only of bulimic learners but of bulimic education, laying the responsibility squarely on the teachers for teaching students the correct view of knowledge. I want to teach my students to value a range of right answers. I want them to be comfortable crafting their own knowledge, instead of relying on me as a teacher to supply a single right answer.

But how?

One answer is this: Only when students are convinced that what they are learning is valuable will they invest in it, exploring new ideas instead of purging them to maintain a strong academic standing. 

The trick to this, apparently, is not only showing students why the subject is valuable in itself. The key is to also show students why the subject is valuable to them. Good teachers, Bain writes, "talk about the promises of the course, about the kinds of question the discipline will help students answer, or about the intellectual, emotional, or physical abilities that it will help them develop" (36-37). They do not "call out from their position deep within the ground and ask students to join their subterranean mining expeditions. They help students to understand the connection between current topics and some larger and more fundamental inquiry, and in so doing find common ground in those 'big questions' that first motivated their own efforts to learn' (37).

In other words, the question is not, What is the one right way to interpret "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? I will get nowhere if I simply insist, "'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is cool!" (Trust me, I have tried this. Insisting that does nothing.) The question is, How does reading this poem, about Prufrock's inner demons, help students deal with their own?

To give another example, the question that I need to answer is not, How can students correctly locate and cite research? It's not Research is cool! The question is, How do correct research practices help students cope with all the information and opinion thrown at them these days, especially on the Internet?

My students will not join my "subterranean mining expedition"; I must drive a shaft between the subject, and the surface where my students exist. So, ultimately, the question is this (I have this written in the margins of Bain's book, it was such an important question for me: What big, universal questions made me first interested in writing and literature? What big, universal questions will make my students interested in them?) My students will not join my "subterranean mining expedition"; I must drive a shaft between the subject, and the surface where my students exist.

To do this, I have to know my students personally. I'm sitting here, trying to describe ways that I can drive this shaft, and all I can come up with are a few broad, general gestures towards one: my students want to learn to defend their faith well, they want good jobs, they want to do well in classes. This is okay, but just like in shooting, the more precise the aim, the deadlier the kill. The more precise I drive my shaft, the more convinced my students will be that what I am teaching is worth holding onto, treasuring, whatever their performance on tests and papers.

I think of my literature students last spring (all bright, all intelligent!). They came into class frustrated that at their first reading of a text, they had not immediately lit upon the one right answer. I think of me trying to convince them that there was no right answer, and in any case, reading literature is about re-reading, being patient with it till it gives up its treasure.

This is true, that students cannot expect to value literature so long as they are "torturing a confession out of it." But it is equally true that for me to dig up its treasures for them, I have to know what my students in fact treasure.

This is what I have learned from Bain's book: The key to making our subject valuable for the students is that we value who our students are.