Tactical Teaching: Part 1—What are We Teaching When and How are We Teaching It?

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

College and graduate school teachers have an advanced degree in a specialized field, but they may not have had a course on teaching and only limited opportunities to be teaching assistants. Historically, the assumption of most graduate programs has been that they will teach you the subject matter but it will up to you to learn how to teach it on your own.

Beyond Learning Styles 

I imagine most of us, when we start to teach, tend to imagine teaching basically as a matter of imparting information. We know more than the students do, and we seek to convey what we know. There is a canon of information about different subjects that we need to cover in various courses. But it doesn’t take long for us to question the limitations of using one approach.

We know, for example, that some people do better by hearing information in a lecture, while others do better by reading about it, and still others benefit most from visual charts and pictures. In addition, there are programs that outline diverse learning styles and identify teaching techniques to address them. Even though I did not adopt any these learning schemes in a consistent way, it proved important for me to be aware of various styles of learning and to provide a range of learning strategies to address them.

Different Strategies for Teaching Different Things

My own efforts to address diverse approaches to teaching and learning focused not so much on the styles of learning as on the different types of things I was teaching. I was asking: What if we are not just teaching knowledge? What if we are teaching skills and techniques? What about teaching methods of interpretation? What if we are teaching students to raise critical questions and weigh evidence? What about teaching to foster certain values? What if we are seeking to engender certain emotional capacities, such as curiosity or wonder or love?

I could not adequately teach these by imparting knowledge about them. It became clear that each of these involved different teaching strategies on my part and diverse learning tasks on the students’ part. Depending on what was being taught, the assignments would be distinctive, classroom exercises and experiences would change, and the means of evaluation would differ.

What follows in this series of posts on “Tactical Teaching” is a brief profile of diverse pedagogical strategies for different teaching things, specifically: conveying information, developing skills, teaching methods, promoting reflection on action, modeling values, expanding consciousness, and fostering human capacities.  Let’s begin broadly…

Conveying Information

Learning information is critical. It is the foundation for understanding and wisdom. It orients students to every subject. The challenging question for me was: How could I teach knowledge in ways that most engaged students so that they could best understand and remember?

Lecturing is the most common form of conveying information in the classroom. There is nothing quite like a good lecture. I have heard lectures that have blown me away, people who argue a particular point of view or who explain something I knew nothing about or who elaborate on something I thought I knew something about. I have heard about great teachers whose classes were oversubscribed and whose lectures at their institution were packed with people sitting on the floor and standing around the edges, eager to soak up the knowledge and wisdom and latest ruminations of this revered thinker. Students want to hear them speak, and they cannot seem to get enough.

At first I thought of lectures mainly as imparting information. Yet there is an art to imparting information that is not only engaging but also potentially transforming. I became aware of this when I was asked to give public lectures, speeches to which I gave much more thought than classroom lectures. The art of lecturing cannot simply be the reading of an essay composed in the mode of writing.

The Art of the Lecture

Lecturing is distinctly oral communication. Oral communication involves engagement, a sense of flow, humor, and the development of an argument that changes pace and that builds to a climax and that leaves the hearers both satisfied and eager for more. I imagine myself in an oral mode of conversation with the audience as I prepare such a lecture, even on occasions when I write it all out and then learn it well enough to do most of it extemporaneously from an outline.

Rhetorically speaking, the lecture will lead the audience to be changed by the experience. I identify first what I hope that change will be, and then gear the unfolding of the information to engender that response. My classroom lectures were shaped by these opportunities to do public lectures. I seldom prepare a lengthy lecture for class. I prefer to give short ten to twenty minute lectures so that there is time afterward to focus on interactions with the class or to facilitate conversations among class members.

Four Principles of Interaction

Among the host of possible interactions in my next post I will introduce four principles for empowering students to learn information beyond the lecture: repetition, context, engagement, and enjoyment. These are all common approaches you will be familiar with; it helps to pursue them with planning and intention.

Nobody teaches everything at once. So this template has helped me to sort out just what it is I want the students to learn at any given time and has enabled me to make use of the modes of interaction with students that need to happen for one goal or another to be achieved. This gives focus to the teaching and clarifies for the students what is expected of them and what possibilities for learning and for being changed lie before them in the class. Much of it happens explicitly, while a great deal happens simply in the course of doing other things. As a teacher, clarifying the possibilities of what I might be teaching and what students might be learning has definitely opened time and space for more to happen than might otherwise have been the case.

Photo Credit: “Lecture Theatre” by Ian Barbour  – CC by 2.0

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