Notes

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"Make Your Teaching Life Easier" Idea #1: Write down a few impressions after each class and any details that stand out. Do this no matter how tired or distracted you are. Use your comments to prepare for the next class--or the next semester of teaching.

Credibility & Leading Discussions

1. Establishing Credibility

Use Your Language to Establish Credibility

The language that teachers use in a classroom has a significant impact on their credibility. These six ideas will help you replace weak language that communicates low expectations with stronger, more confident language.

1. Avoid rising intonation at the end of sentences. Instead of finishing a sentence with "right?" or "okay?" that can be seen as giving options, just end the sentence: "Do the problems on page 284."

2. Don’t sound doubtful about the course or assignments. Ask a colleague or mentor to review your tests or assignments ahead of time—and avoid saying to the class, "I hope this is clear" or "I wasn’t sure if you could do this much."

3. If it’s the student’s responsibility, don’t apologize. If a student is late, misses an assignment, forgets the bibliography, etc., replace "I’m sorry" with neutral language like "That’s too bad for you" or "You must be frustrated." That puts the responsibility back in the student’s hands.

4. Don’t put yourself down. Rather than apologizing for something you don’t know ("I’m new at this" or "I haven’t studied this yet") tell students that you’ll find out the answer before the next class. That’s a better way of demonstrating your capabilities.

5. Give praise appropriate to the event. If students answer simple questions, responding "Fantastic!" decreases teacher credibility—it wasn’t "super" that they knew the basics. This is important in grading, too. Use grades to reflect the content and don’t over-praise.

6. Don’t provide an open forum to criticize your teaching. Letting criticisms have full vent means students will feed on each other’s negative comments. If there’s a legitimate concern over issues—a test, a reading—tell them they can contact you via email or during office hours.

Adapted from Eddy, Judy. "Establishing Credibility in the Classroom by Transforming Your Teaching Persona." Good Teaching Avenues. From Middendorf, J. and S. Yandell. "Replacing Weak Language with Strong: Transforming Your Teaching Persona." The National Teaching and Learning Forum. 2002. 11 (5). 7-9.

2. Discussions

When teachers talk about discussions, two common concerns are how to get students to do the assigned reading and how to make the interchange more active. The resources below give you ideas for how to improve discussions in those areas and others, and they point out what good discussions lend to classroom learning. (All of these resources have many details, so stop by the CTE for complete versions.)

Tips for Leading Great Discussions

Be prepared:

1. Carefully consider why a discussion will benefit your class.

2. Use discussions to link concepts, for critical evaluation, and to address open-ended questions.

3. Help the discussion begin with a warm-up activity.

Facilitate, don’t dominate:

4. Provide clear guidelines for participation.

5. Maintain safety and respect.

6. Use open-ended questions.

7. Summarize responses without choosing a side.

8. Have students address each other, not you.

9. Stimulate and challenge instead of intimidating.

10. Control the talkers, gently call on non-talkers.

11. If you take notes on a chalkboard, include everyone’s.

12. Review main ideas and conclusions towards the session’s end.

Evaluate:

13. Notice who participated and who didn’t—are there patterns?

14. Check the tone.

15. Ask for student feedback.

Adapted from "17 Tips for Leading Great Discussions," Center for Teaching and Learning.

Improving Discussions

Discussion Strengths:

• Provide the instructor with feedback about student learning.

• Appropriate for higher-order cognitive objectives: application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

• Helps students develop interests and values, and to change attitudes.

• Allows students to become more active participants in their learning.

Discussion Weaknesses:

• Difficult to get student participation.

• More time consuming.

• Not well suited to covering significant amounts of content.

• May require more planning than lectures.

• Instructor has less control.

Cognitive Aspects and Preparation:

• Define the topic.

• Instructor must be prepared.

• Use a common experience.

• Act as a facilitator.

• Create suggestions for questioning.

Affective Aspects and Preparation:

• Know your students.

• Be patient and considerate.

• Challenge but do not threaten.

• Avoid premature agreement.

• Deal with conflicts, don’t ignore them.

• Be silent, hear them out, inquire, paraphrase, and be accepting.

Regarding participation:

• Create an expectation of participation.

• Clarify how participation will affect grades.

• Avoid always looking directly at the student speaking.

• Control excessive talkers.

• Act as a group leader.

Adapted from Cashin, William E. and Philip C. McKnight. "Improving Discussions." Idea Paper No. 15. Manhattan: Kansas State University Division of Continuing Education. January 1986.

The Dreaded Discussion: Ten Ways to Start

Although the core of this article by Peter Frederick is the list of ten concrete ideas for getting discussions going, don’t miss the principles that guide discussions.

Principles and assumptions about discussions:

• We have much to learn from each other, so all must be encouraged to participate.

• Devise ways so each student has something to say.

• Students are expected to do structured thinking about a text before the discussion.

• Class relationships are enhanced by trust, support, acceptance and respect.

• Feedback is crucial for each student.

• The primary goal is always to enhance understanding of some topic or text.

• Different kinds of texts, purposes, and individuals suggest different approaches.

Ten concrete ideas to start discussions:

1. Goals and values. Students pair off and decide two things: what the primary value is of that day’s material and how it meshes with course goals.

2. Concrete images. Ask each student to recall one concrete image/scene/moment from the text that stood out.

3. Generating questions. Frederick lists five ways to have students generate questions about a text.

4. Finding illustrative quotations. Students must produce a quotation from the text that they find significant.

5. Breaking into smaller groups. This enables more people to say something and thus generates more ideas.

6. Generating truth statements. Groups determine three statements known to be true about a particular issue.

7. Forced debate. Require students to defend one side or the other of an issue.

8. Role-playing. Tricky, as not all students want to become animated, but Frederick lists several approaches that can make this powerful strategy successful.

9. Non-structured scene setting. With limited verbal instructions, the teacher sets up a scene—via slides, music, a quotation, list of names—that prompts students to start the discussion on their own.

10. A tenth way to start. Back to a basic approach: "How’d you like it?"

Adapted from Frederick, Peter. "The Dreaded Discussion: Ten Ways to Start." Classroom Communications. 1-10.