Becoming a Better Teacher
Discussions as practice
I am an expert historical researcher. I have been trained by leading figures in my field, and I have participated in hundreds of classes, workshops, and conferences that have provided opportunities to hone my research skills. I read the latest research in my field, and I produce some of it myself.
I have never received formal instruction as a teacher.
Now, to most academics, this is a commonplace observation. There are good reasons to emphasize the research side of being a professor. Professors are supposed to add to human knowledge, and that’s difficult! Graduate schools, especially doctoral programs, exist to help students learn how to do that.
Upon graduation, the assumption is that those students will become professors. Few do, nowadays, thanks to the collapse of the humanities academic job market—but that’s not the point of this post. The reality of the job market has not yet undermined the general assumption that graduate schools exist to generate more professors to teach at universities. And therein lies the irony: graduate students learn how to be good researchers, but professors spend most of their time teaching. How can we expect professors to be good teachers if they’ve only ever been trained to be good researchers?
We can’t, and we shouldn’t, and yet that is how the system works. One reason for this is that there is a general assumption among academics that teaching requires no formal instruction. As one leading historian told me, on my first day of graduate school, “If you can walk and talk you can teach.”
Most academics, I hope, would instinctively recoil from that statement, but as Harry Brighouse discusses in this excellent essay from 2019, that is exactly the kind of assumption that has distorted graduate education in the humanities. Moreover, the incentives don’t change as you climb the professorial ladder. It’s very difficult to suffer professional consequences for being a bad teacher because universities value research and service far more.
And in any case, Brighouse says, most bad teachers don’t realize they’re bad teachers:
If you have fairly good command of the material you are teaching, are okay at explaining things, have some patience, and have a friendly affect, you can go a long time without realizing you are not teaching well. … I was used to good student evaluations of my teaching because, well, I am moderately well-organized, I key my talk to the material they should have read, I’m reasonably friendly, and they like my accent. … I wondered whether my high student evaluations might reflect the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Oof. I felt seen when I read that.
The point of this post is to encourage you to read the whole thing, especially if you ever find yourself in a teaching-and-learning setting (and who doesn’t?).
But I also want to drill down on one of his arguments about the purpose of class discussions, as I prepare for the start of my teaching term next month. Humanities professors, he points out, can quickly get frustrated with class discussions because professors “value rigor and know that the best guarantee of optimal rigor is to use all the airspace themselves. Our talk is rigorous, while our students’ talk is sloppy.” So if students mostly listen to the professor talk, they will at least be listening to a rigorous expert.
But will they actually learn anything? Brighouse says no. In the humanities especially, it can be very difficult to measure student learning outcomes. But it’s clear that the best way to learn any skill, in any context, is to practice. Classroom discussions, therefore, need to provide students space to practice, so they can learn intellectual rigor. Brighouse: “[F]or that to happen, the professor must be willing to sacrifice some rigor. My [Brighouse’s] impulse to give rigor undue priority over engagement was preventing discussion from happening.”
I’m about to start teaching “War at Sea in the Age of Sail” for the seventh time. I revise my lesson plans and readings every year. This year, I want to carve out space in every class for student practice, and I’m going to try to call it that. After all, putting “class discussion” in a lesson plan doesn’t necessarily produce a class discussion. It can too easily turn into a hub-and-spokes dynamic, in which each student in the class speaks, but they speak only to me. That’s not practice. It has a tendency to become performative on the part of the students as they try to impress me, or dictatorial on my part, as I try to correct their sloppiness.1
I will report back with the results. I’m not optimistic, actually. I’ve repeatedly had students (especially Naval War College students) tell me that they wanted to hear more from me and less from each other. But listening to me isn’t practicing rigorous historical analysis. In any case, if you want to listen to me talk, read my book!2
Finally, a navel-gazing note, for which I hope you’ll forgive me. I have been breathing the “if-you-can-walk-and-talk-you-can-teach” air for so long now that it was hard to hit publish on this post. After all, an uncharitable reading of it suggests:
I’ve never thought about teaching before and have just now realized I’m bad at it.
My classes must be awful places where I yell at students who say stupid things.
I just learned what a class discussion is.
Again, uncharitable, but this is the internet, so that’s the baseline expectation. But I’m going forward with it because I learned when writing the post about how I wrote The Horrible Peace that breaking through the various stigmas that plague academia can be refreshing for some of my readers. Perhaps this will be helpful in the same way.
A related issue is the tension in a history classroom between content and skills. It’s hard to practice analyzing historical phenomena and relating your analysis to what other historians have said if you have no idea what happened when or who said what about it. When is it appropriate to provide students space to practice? How much can you rely on students doing the reading (and understanding it) before class? In my case, I’m tightly constrained in the number of pages I can assign per week, and I’m teaching students who haven’t taken a course on the eighteenth century in at least a decade and often ever. I’ll have more to say about these challenges in future posts, I hope.