DEFINING TEACHING

What is "teaching?" Is there a definition of teaching so broad as to include all of the types of instruction mentioned above? Are there common elements involved in all teaching?

In 1871 an obscure politician named James A. Garfield remarked at a Williams College alumni banquet that "the ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." Mark Hopkins was a former president of Williams College and Garfield's favorite teacher. (In those days, the president of the college was the best teacher.) Garfield, who went on to become the twentieth president of the United States, could think of no better educational situation than to have a student sit on a log and interact with Mark Hopkins.1

Actually, the image is a good one for helping to define teaching. It can be converted into a simple model as follows:

"Teaching", in this model, is defined as the "the interaction of a student and a teacher over a subject."2 There may be one student or several in a class. The students can be young or old, bright or below average intelligence, "normal" or physically challenged, highly motivated or "turned off," rich or poor, male or female. The subject can be easy and straightforward or difficult and complex. The teacher may not be physically present, as with televised or computer-assisted instruction. But in most situations, the model holds up. A teacher, a student, and a subject. And where is the log? The model is enclosed in a box to represent the setting where teaching takes place. Teaching takes place somewhere, in some specific context. The institution may be highly selective, or "open door" in its admissions policies. The climate for learning may be favorable or destructive, supportive or frustrating. The resources, both physical and human, may be lavish or meager. No teacher teaches in a vacuum. The setting makes a difference. Teaching involves a teacher trying to teach someone something somewhere.

Can there be teaching without students? Probably not. Philosophers may argue about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound even if there is no one there to listen; but if there are no students, there is no teaching. Can there be teaching when there are students, but no teacher? There certainly can be learning without a teacher. A great amount of learning goes on without teachers; but the activity is called learning, not teaching. Can there be teaching without a subject? Can a person swim without water? There must be a medium, a subject, about which there can be structured and sustained dialogue. Teaching involves a teacher and a student interacting over a subject in a setting.

But what is this interaction with students that we call teaching? What is the nature of the communication that moves across the log between teachers and students?

AN ART, A SCIENCE, A PROFESSION

Some say that teaching is a science. These people stress the scientific aspects of teaching and focus on ways to systematize the communication between teacher and student. They believe that it is possible, through careful selection and pacing of materials, to regulate interactions among the student, the teacher, and materials to be learned, thus reducing the possibility that learning occurs by chance. They believe that enough is now known about how people learn to develop a technology of teaching. One of the chief advocates of a technology of teaching was B.F. Skinner.3 He argued that teachers can be trained to employ educational technology or to use "fool-proof" materials that do the teaching.

Others say that teaching is an art. These people believe that "scientific" teaching ends up in formalized, cookbook approaches that force students to perform and bureaucratizes learning. Besides, they argue, actual teaching involves great amounts of intuition, improvisation, and expressiveness, and effective teaching depends on high levels of creativity, sound judgment, and insight. Elliot Eisner, a professor of education at Stanford, has likened the artistic aspects of teaching to the activity of a symphony conductor. The teacher, like the conductor, draws upon a repertoire of skills and orchestrates a highly complex process.4 Teaching, Eisner argues, is much more like the work of the artist than the scientist. Teaching involves complex judgments that unfold during the course of instruction. Teachers must deal creatively with the unexpected. There are no fail-safe routines and prescriptions. Furthermore, the most important goals of teaching are those events that occur during the process. The outcomes are often embedded in the learning process itself.5

Perhaps the controversy about teaching should not be cast as an either-or debate. Is it not possible that teaching may be some art and some science? If so, what is the relationship of the art and the science? When is the art employed? When is the science employed?

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that teaching involves artistic judgments that depend on science. As N.L. Gage notes, there is a "scientific basis for the art of teaching."6 For teachers, this scientific base is found chiefly in the social sciences, in the research on learning generated by the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and speech communication. Naturally, the "knowledge" produced by the social sciences, like that of the physical sciences, is growing and ever-changing, subject to correction and open to new findings. But a knowledge base exists and is there to be known and understood by teachers. One of the major purposes of this book is to make that knowledge base available to those who teach at the college level. To be effective, we need to know what is known about how people learn.

Perhaps the best way to think about teaching is to call it what it should be called, not an art, not a science, but a profession. Teaching involves professional judgment. Teaching calls for the trained eye to see what is actually happening, and the trained mind to decide what to do next. In fact, the mark of a profession is that its knowledge can not be reduced to fail-safe rules and universal prescriptions. Most of us think of ourselves as professionals "in our field," that is, as chemists, sociologists, accountants, or nurses, but do we think of our teaching as professional activity? Do we believe that teaching requires the same sophisticated levels of knowledge and the same complex choices made by other important professionals: attorneys, physicians, clergy, psychologists, engineers, architects?7 Professionals cannot rely on guesswork; as teachers, there are things we need to know. Scientific knowledge and a keen sense of how to apply it are both required for making well-informed professional decisions about teaching.

TOUGH DECISIONS, LITTLE FEEDBACK

What are these professional decisions, and how do teachers make them? Most teachers in colleges and universities play out complex roles where teaching is only one of the many things they do, along with research, advising, professional service, consulting, and involvement in the governance process of their institution. In most proprietary institutions and in some community colleges, many teachers also manage a business, practice a trade, or carry on a professional practice "on the side." As teachers, we are busy with many things besides teaching. Because of this, there is a great temptation for us to "wing it," to go into the classroom and improvise.

Life in the classroom can be hectic.8 Before class students have questions about assignments and grades, they ask for handouts from the previous class (which they missed), or they want to know if the tests were handed back and what's going to be on the next one. During class teachers dispense information, ask questions, give answers, respond to comments, guide discussions, and referee arguments. We try to get the silent students to talk and the loud-mouths to pipe down. We set up, use, and take down various kinds of media. We look for barometers of the classroom climate--signs that the work is too easy, too hard, or just boring. We give encouragement and feedback. We give and hand back tests, make assignments, mark our recordbooks, and otherwise monitor student progress. After class there are more questions. Classrooms are busy places!

In class, teachers do a lot of "thinking on their feet" in the midst of the act of teaching.9 We are constantly considering one or more alternatives, choosing between continuing on one path or selecting another. Important decisions are being made every few seconds. We are busy gathering information, seeking cues, and monitoring what is happening to individuals or within groups. We look for discrepancies between what should be happening and what is happening so that we can intervene. We are making distinctions, translating observations into useful concepts, and making rapid-fire choices. Unfortunately, the choices are often between two "goods." We have to choose between encouraging the rough-shod flamboyant initiative of a young man of limited ability versus the shy genius of a retiring older woman. We have to choose between spending the rest of the hour nailing down statistical formulas for students having trouble with them or moving on to the more challenging process of application. Is it best to keep discussion on track or follow an interesting diversion? It is hard to choose the "right" alternative when both alternatives are "right." Teachers are busy decision makers.

Because classrooms are busy places and teachers are preoccupied with the decisions they are making, teachers are not always aware of what is actually happening. Most of us consistently underestimate the amount of time we talk; we are seldom aware, even in "discussion classes," of how we monopolize the conversation. We are blind to the fact that we interact with some students much more frequently than others--more with men than women, more with bright students than poor students, more with those seated front and center than in the back row or on the periphery. Some teachers experience shock when they are told these things. When we see a videotape of our teaching we are often horrified to discover halting speech, out-of-control gestures, constant pacing, poor eye contact, or other disturbing mannerisms.

Unfortunately, teachers don't get much feedback on their classroom behavior because their teaching is done in relative isolation. In most colleges and universities, the old adage still applies: "My classroom is my castle." We may talk with other teachers about our subject, but we seldom talk about how we teach our subject. When we receive feedback from students through end-of-the-term course evaluations, it is usually in the form of Likert-scale responses to items about "preparedness," "knowledge of the subject," and "respect for student opinions." Although this information from course evaluations can be very valuable, faculty often find reasons to discount (or repress) this feedback. It is a rare professor who asks students, "What do you really think about my teaching?" Even when students are given an opportunity for candid constructive criticism, it is usually not early enough in the term for the teacher to do anything about it. For the most part, the academic world of higher education is simply not structured to give teachers regular, meaningful, sophisticated feedback about their teaching. Therefore, most of us struggle along in splendid isolation, working as independent practicing professionals, without supervision (even as a novice) and without built-in mechanisms for generating new ideas and techniques.

GAINING PERSPECTIVE, USING STRATEGIES

An apparent contradiction emerges from these observations about the life of teachers in college classrooms. On the one hand, teachers are too busy to think, they are driven by day-to-day tasks, and they are sometimes dreadfully out of touch with reality.

On the other hand, teachers are thinking all the time, making quick and frequent ad hoc decisions, trying to resolve dilemmas and explain to themselves what's happening. If this is what teaching is, being partially blinded by the dazzling glare of the classroom, but struggling to use what vision we have to see, what can be done to help us restore our sight? How can we learn to see more clearly what is happening in our classrooms and regain more control over our teaching?

Thomas Good and Jere Brophy put the matter succinctly: "If you don't know how to look, you don't see very much."10 If you don't know what a play action pass is, you won't see it on the football field. If you don't know what a checkmate is, you won't see it on the chessboard. Similarly, there are certain things that we need to be able to see in our classrooms; and to see them, we need to know what to look for. Teachers need perspective.

In the research on the differences between beginning and experienced teachers in school settings, one of the clear and conclusive findings is that inexperienced teachers lack the conceptual structures to make sense of classrooms events. Beginning teachers simply do not extract the same levels of meaning from what they see. Experienced teachers see better what is happening.11 True, they have more knowledge about the subject, but experienced teachers also have more perspective on the instructional process. They know how to "read" the classroom like a football quarterback reads the defense. One might expect a similar difference between novice and experienced college teachers; and in fact the gap may be more pronounced, because most college teachers have had no formal training whatsoever in what to "see." Effective teachers of whatever level, like connoisseurs of fine wine, need to know how to spot the little differences that are, in fact, the big differences.

The primary purpose of Part I of this book is to help those who teach in higher education settings to gain perspective, so that they can see better what's happening in their classrooms. To see more clearly, there are certain things teachers need to know about the subject, the setting, and the students. In the next three chapters the focus is on seeing--understanding what to look for. Among others, the following questions are addressed:

• Perspective 1: The Subject: What is the subject? What is the curriculum? How are the objectives of instruction established? How does the teacher make decisions about the scope and sequencing of material and the appropriate amount of breadth and depth? What is the overall organizing principle of the curriculum and how can it be discovered? What are the deeper values underlying instruction and how does the teacher recognize them?
• Perspective 2: The Setting: How is teaching affected by the setting in which it takes place? How do arrangements of physical space and social structure affect classroom communication? How do patterns of organizational mission, culture, and climate shape the setting? How does the setting provide limits for what will be attempted in the classroom? Why is it important for there to be a good fit between the teacher and the setting?
• Perspective 3: The Students: How does developmental life stage affect learning? What are the social and emotional developmental tasks that adults face as they move through the life cycle? Are there stages of cognitive development and differences in the way students engage in thinking? What is intelligence and how do students differ in the types and amount of intelligence, aptitude, and motivation they possess? How do physical differences in sensory capacity affect learning? Do students have different learning styles? How do differences in ethnic background, social class, and gender affect learning?

The primary purpose of Part II of this book is to help those who teach in higher education settings to develop teaching strategies, so that they can control, focus, and organize their communication with students. As teachers, we not only need to be able to see what is happening in our classrooms, we need to know what to do about what we see. We need to be able to think more clearly about the "activity" of teaching itself. Teachers need some means of organizing their efforts, some ways of conceptualizing the activity they initiate in the classroom. Therefore, effective teachers use teaching strategies. They don't walk into the classroom with some fuzzy idea like . . . maybe we'll have a discussion today. They don't ask, mid-way through a lesson: What was it we were supposed to be doing? They know, because they are working within the framework of a consciously selected teaching strategy. Effective teachers have a game plan for success, a method for organizing the choices they make. Their teaching is under control.

Most of what teachers do can be conceptualized under five strategies. The dictionary definition of strategy is "a plan, a method or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result." Applied to college teaching, the term "strategy" refers to a plan and a series of activities used to facilitate a particular kind of learning. The choice of the term "strategy" is intentional. The more commonly used term "method" usually refers to approaches to teaching such as "lecture," "discussion," or "laboratory" methods.12 Although this is a common way of thinking about postsecondary teaching, "methods" usually are not based on a paradigm of how people learn. For example, a "discussion" could involve either an inquiry or group strategy. The term "discussion method," therefore, is not very useful for thinking about how to organize teaching. A more valuable approach--with more intellectual substance to it--is to base teaching on conceptions of how people learn. Oddly enough, a great amount of "teaching" takes place without much thought about how students learn. In this book, each of the five strategies is related to a learning paradigm, a base of knowledge in the social sciences about how learning takes place.

The term "paradigm" has been used in a technical way by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.13 Kuhn uses the term "paradigm" to describe the acknowledged bodies of belief and theory that undergird the activities of "normal science." Thus a paradigm is an accepted way of looking at the world out of which grow the questions, observations, and analyses of various forms of scientific endeavor. Newton and Einstein used different paradigms for "doing" physics. Paradigms shift, and eventually new paradigms replace the old, hence the occurrence of "scientific revolutions." In this book the term "paradigm" is used for the accepted models or patterns that describe the way people learn. In one sense, these are more than just "theories of learning." They involve, as Kuhn suggests, ways of looking at the world that determine what questions get asked and what research gets done. The behaviorist, for example, thinks of learning in a very different way from the way the communications expert looks at the learning that occurs in groups. The kind of learning that occurs is different, the way it takes place is different, the uses to which it is put are different, and the kind of research that has been done to elaborate "how it works" is different. Learning paradigms are based on different assumptions about what learning is and how it takes place. On the other hand, "paradigm" is used in a much less technical and more modest way in this book than in Kuhn's treatise on the philosophy of science. A "learning paradigm" is not in the same league intellectually with Einstein's reordering of the way we look at the universe. Learning paradigms are "lower case p" paradigms.

As will become evident in the five chapters on teaching strategies in Part II, each of the strategies is based on a different paradigm of the way people learn. The important thing to understand at this point is that the strategies grow out of these paradigms, and the paradigms are different. The underlying assumption for this book is that better teaching will result when postsecondary teachers begin to get a better grasp of how learning occurs. We will become more effective when we consciously choose to employ teaching strategies, when we broaden our repertory of strategies, and when we become more skilled in using these strategies. The five strategies are identified as follows:

• Strategy 1: Training and Coaching: Developing basic and advanced skills by using clear objectives, breaking instruction into steps, and reinforcing progress. Based on the findings of behavioral psychology.
• Strategy 2: Lecturing and Explaining: Presenting information in ways that it can be attended to, easily processed, and remembered. Based on research in cognitive psychology.
• Strategy 3: Inquiry and Discovery: Teaching thinking skills, problem-solving, and creativity through inquiry and discovery. Based on studies of thinking processes and the psychological research on reasoning and creativity.
• Strategy 4: Groups and Teams: Sharing information, working cooperatively on projects, and exploring attitudes, opinions, and beliefs through group processes. Based on research on group communication and teams.
• Strategy 5: Experience and Reflection: Enabling students to reflect on learning that takes place in work settings, internships, travel, or outdoor activities. Based on holistic learning theory and theories of counseling that facilitate insight and self-understanding.

These five strategies provide useful conceptual frameworks for organizing instruction. They can be employed with any subject in any setting and across any age group of students, from college freshmen through senior citizens. The five strategies, together with the three perspectives (on the subject, the setting, and the students) provide the basic professional information that any postsecondary teacher needs to become more effective as a teacher. The rest comes through practice, patience, and perspiration.