Thursday, August 11, 2011

Top Ten Graduate Teacher Mistakes: Number 9

This is a continuation of the "Top Ten" list I started several months ago. I realize now it was a pretty ambitious goal for me. I should have made it a Top Five list. At any rate, as promised, here's number nine:

Number Nine: Asking Too Many Questions
Some of my graduate student teachers may be reading this thinking, "Is he talking about me?" Well, yes, but not in a bad way. I'm talking about myself as well, I suppose. As I prep for my Fall classes, I'm faced with making assignments new again. And while I can plan things out, starting with learning outcomes and following through to some kind of assessment, there's no way I can really tell if something's going to work.

The more experience a teacher has, the better she can anticipate what questions and difficulties students might have. But she can never really know how a new lesson plan will turn out. Sometimes we have great stuff we think the students will love, and they don't. Other times, we might go in and wing it only to have things go great. When this happens I sometimes walk out of class thinking, "It's too bad I won't be able to replicate that dynamic every time, because that was great."

I encourage asking questions, and believe me, some graduate student teachers take this to heart and ask all sorts of things I honestly had never thought of before. While I can answer some--or most, I hope, some questions teachers have are better left unanswered. "Will this work?" I don't know. Maybe. Consider so-and-so and give it a try. "Is this activity a good idea?" Unless you're talking explicitly about sex or admonishing students about a particular religious point of view, you're probably safe. Give it a try. And so on.

The short answer: I don't know. The longer answer involves a communication theory, as most of my longer answers do: specifically, sense-making. Karl Weick, who forwarded said theory, is famous for a saying, which I'll paraphrase here: How do I know what I want to say until I see what I said? Setting aside for a moment the ableist language in that colloquialism (it privileges speaking and hearing as the primary knowledge-gaining senses), I like it and think it applies here. I realize this doesn't really hold water if we're accountable for students' test scores and such. But even within such constraints, in fact, some say only within constraints,  creativity and problem-solving coalesce in the art that is teaching.