Part One:
Beginning to Teach
"The
Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching"
"Lecturing:
Using a Much Maligned Method of Teaching"
"Teaching
by Lecture"
"On
Discussion Teaching"
 The
Profession of Teaching
"What
Little I Think I Know About Teaching"
"The
Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines"
The
College Curriculum
The
Academic Advisers
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What Little I Think I Know about Teaching
Wayne Booth
As I was thinking last week about what should be said to a bunch of graduate
students preparing to be teachers, I met a colleague in the corridor of
Regenstein Library. A winner of the Quantrell Prize for Excellence in
Undergraduate Teaching, he had just seen the announcement of this event
[The Student as Text], and he growled, "You know and I know that all that
stuff is crap. Nothing is really known about how to teach well; the most
that could be known would be how to make students like the class and the
professor and thus believe, probably erroneously, that they have been
taught something worth learning." Greatly encouraged by this outburst,
I happened to meet a professor of education here in the hall, and I asked
him, "Phil, what is really known about teaching?" His reply: "Not much!
I'm just reviewing an 1100-page book summarizing educational research.
In my view, the book is pretty discouraging. There's really not a lot
of hard knowledge to report."
I next looked into a little book sent me by a former student, A Celebration
of Teachers, published by the National Council of Teachers of English
(Urbana, Illinois, 1985). I found some wonderfully inspirational memories
by famous people, mostly writers, describing the unsung great teachers
who changed their lives: Peter de Vries told how John de Boer, his first
high school English teacher, teaching one of his first classes, made his
pupils into "kindred spirits, . . . responsive to his dazzling mind, his
richly humanitarian spirit, and his deep love of . . . literature." Madeleine
L'Engle remembered a sixth-grade teacher, also in her first teaching job,
who "was the first person in all of my school life to see any potential
talent in this shy, introverted child. Bernard Malamud said that Clara
Molendyk "was very fond of her students and made us feel expansive, free,
and useful." Art Buchwald blessed a Mrs. Marie Gorking, at P.S. 35 in
Hollis, New York, who, finding that Buchwald could not resist clowning,
"gave me the opportunity to perform in front of the class in exchange
for shutting up when she was trying to teach grammar."
I wonder how many of you would be able to respond with similar memories
when asked about some one or two teachers who made all the difference.
Well, that's surely what we're talking about today, isn't it?
In any case, since I could find no clear generalization from all that,
I turned to a new book from Jossey-Bass, called Distinguished Teachers
on Effective Teaching, edited by Peter Beidler (1986), and again I
found such a plethora of seemingly contradictory suggestions as to make
me almost despair about our project today.
Clearly we should begin cautiously and humbly, though I hope not despairingly.
We're talking about the most difficult of all arts. Like all arts, it
surely must depend in part on knowledge, but, like all arts, it depends
on knowledge that is elusive, manifold, and resistant to clear formulation.
In short, if generalizations are dangerous, and I think they usually
are, they are especially dangerous about teaching. There is no recommendation
that will work for all teachers, or, as my colleague Jamie Redfield likes
to say, "No teacher, not even the best, succeeds with every student, and
there may be no teacher who succeeds with no one."
Suppose we begin by trying out three generalizations.
1. Good teaching is dramatic, colorful, lively, entertaining.—Right?
A Dean at Earlham College thought so once, and, when bad reports came
in on the teaching of Tom Bassett, Assistant Professor of American History,
he called the poor man in and told him to jazz things up a little. Bassett
thought about it and appeared before his class in Colonial American history
next day sporting a Davy Crockett costume, shooting off a cap pistol,
and shouting "Yippee-ee-ee!" The result, almost needless to say, was disastrous.
The episode reminds me of a story I heard recently about a professor of
physics at
Harvard who last year taught his unit on jet propulsion by putt-putting
himself into the classroom in a jet-propelled wheelchair, repeating the
act at the end of the lecture. I can't help wondering whether his students
were as contemptuous as Tom Bassett's.
At the opposite extreme from such shenanigans is my memory of one of
the teachers who taught me most in graduate school. George Williamson
violated every technique of good teaching that anyone has ever thought
of. He would come into the classroom and shuffle, shifty eyed, to a little
platform, open an attaché case in front of him, in such a way as
to preclude all eye contact, focus his eyes alternately on the text and
a far high corner of the room, and proceed to explicate T. S. Eliot's
poems. It took me several weeks to realize that I was learning a lot,
far more than I learned in many a more engaging class.
2. Good teaching results from passionate engagement with the subject.—Well,
of course it sometimes does, but I've known—indeed I now know—teachers
who are deeply learned in and passionate about their subjects who just
don't get through to even the best students, except at the most advanced
levels, and that rarely. By the same token I know others whose learning
is superficial and casual, who care more indeed about the stock exchange
than about scholarship, but who in teaching younger students manage to
wake up the sleepy, convert the hostile, and change lives in what I consider
good directions. Perhaps even more significantly, I can honestly say that
my own worst teaching has often been about those subjects on which I consider
myself expert. The novel that I have taught most ineptly, the one that
I now refuse to teach, is the one I did my dissertation on, Tristram
Shandy. I just know too much about it—and I try to stuff it all
in at once.
3. Good teaching results from caring for students, from "teaching
the child, not the subject," as the cliché goes, or from "teaching
the whole person," or, in the terms of our program today, from taking
the student as text rather than, say, Socrates, Shakespeare, Thucydides,
or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.—Since most of what I
want to say might seem to be a recommendation of this one, I won't dwell
on the exceptions to these claims—there's no use in turning you off
at the beginning. But I do want to underline the following warning: Perhaps
more bad teaching has resulted from a misapplied concentration on personality
exchange, in the name of serving the student, not the subject, than from
any other practice.
With those warnings against any generalizations you hear from anybody
else today, I shall now of course offer some hard indubitable truths about
teaching, my own deep wisdom acquired through four decades of perpetual
anxiety and frequent failure.
Actually I have only one, a big one, one that I really believe in, with
no surrounding ironies or discountings: bad teaching most often results
from a pursuit of the wrong ends, either because the teacher is unclear
about his or her purposes or because plausible but harmful purposes get
in the way of good ones. There are of course many legitimate purposes
of teaching, depending on different subject matters and circumstances,
but I want to suggest that in America today one purpose that is legitimate
for some occasions has been allowed to intrude harmfully on too many occasions
in which it is not only inappropriate but destructive. I mean the aim
of conveying information, of covering material. We are an information-burdened
society, and the loading of information into minds conceived as memory
banks has come to dominate far too much of our educational practice. Much
of the information loading is of course described in fancy, respectable
terms. One current prominent movement in my field, sparked by Secretary
of Education Bennett, based on a bit of misreading of E. D. Hirsch, calls
it "imparting cultural literacy." In science courses, it is often disguised
as something called problem solving. That title makes it sound active
and somehow connected with thinking, but the student is too often left
going through the motions that no real problem solver ever went through—the
abstracted paths that were worked out as a retrospective explanation after
the problem had been solved. In history, information loading has long
been deplored, but it is still, I would judge, the main goal of far too
much instruction.
Of course there are many occasions when information loading is proper
or even necessary, but I think they occur mainly in the precollege years.
We are here talking about college teaching, and there is one crucial difference
between teaching a sixth grader, say, and teaching a college student.
The pupil has to go on to the seventh grade whether he or she wants to
or not; the college student is free to drop the subject permanently at
the end of the course. As our appalling attrition rates tell us, college
students are free to proclaim, "Never again."
So I like to think about a different goal, one that doesn't prevent all
imparting of information but one that certainly complicates our thinking
about what we are up to: good college teaching is the kind that promises
to make the teacher finally superfluous, the kind that will lead students
to want to continue work in the given subject and to be able to have the
necessary intellectual equipment to continue work at a more advanced level.
A crass way of putting this goal is to say that the good teacher is out
to make converts to his or her field—not necessarily to turn students
into majors or professionals in the field but to turn them into adults
who will continue learning in that field either professionally or as amateurs.
William James once said that you could tell an educated man by what sections
of the daily newspaper he could read and understand. (Of course James
said "he," not "he or she"). That may seem like a fairly low-level goal,
but actually it's not bad: what kind of success could a teacher claim
when a student, ten years later, meeting the subject in some journal,
popular or learned, turned away from it in disgust or the conviction that
only boredom lies ahead?
What follows for teaching when the teacher tries to ensure that students
will want to continue and will be able to continue after the end
of ten weeks or a year or four years? Note that our goal is not that the
student should want to continue with this teacher; that kind of loving
attachment is relatively easy of obtain—and often dangerous when
it comes. Love of the teacher is not a goal of teaching but a dispensable
and often dangerous by-product of the goal, which, to repeat, is freedom
from the teacher and attachment to the subject.
First and most important, it follows that any given course should be
viewed not primarily as a preparation for some future course or future
experience but as an end in itself. It may seem paradoxical to say that,
if you hope for a future that includes your subject, you must not teach
to that future but to a delight in learning in the present moment. But
it's not a paradox. Love cannot be prepared for with hate, at least not
usually. What I have loved today I will want to have more of tomorrow.
This means that ideally—and no teacher realizes the ideal—each
day's class should be so rich in the excitement of learning that every
student will say, at the end of the day, "The high point of my day was
that class. I can't wait to see what we'll learn there tomorrow."
Obviously, this doesn't mean that Tom Bassett was wise when he chose
to dress up like Davy Crockett. Primarily it means for me that I can never
be satisfied when I think students are not led, by the situations I set
up, to take an active responsibility for what is going on now and what
will go on next week. To deliver a lecture and assure myself that every
student is dutifully taking notes may give me the illusion that they are
learning actively, and of course some kind of activity is going on even
when notes are taken in boredom or hostility. But that kind of receptive
role, even when the student retains some of what is received, I think
of as passive—though Professor Voss assured me yesterday that all
theorists of education now agree that there can be no such thing as passive
learning: to learn anything at all we must have an activated mind that
grasps it, in whatever form. This must be so, if we mean by "passive"
a simple blank indifference. It is certainly true that the theorists I
admire most, in contrast to what many prophets of artificial intelligence
seem to say, agree with Professor Voss that whatever the mind does is
done by constructing, constituting, grasping, not just by taking in or
receiving or containing or retaining.
Perhaps a better contrast would be between responsible engagement and
obedient receptivity. The kind of active learning I'm hoping to see more
of is the kind that takes responsibility for where a given moment is to
go, in contrast to the kind of receptivity that leaves it entirely to
the teacher's authority to determine where things are to go.
When we take that contrast seriously—when we really pursue a responsible
engagement—certain things follow about classroom practice, especially
about the proportion of lecturing and discussion, and about the kind of
lecturing and discussion we engage in. It does not follow that we should
never lecture, or that all discussions produce responsible engagement,
but I think it does follow that any technique that allows the student
to leave the classroom assuming that the task of thinking through to the
next step lies entirely with the teacher has somehow failed. I suggest
that that doleful effect, that hurrying away after class to something
else that is really engaging, is produced much more often by lecturing
than by seriously planned and executed discussions.
It is no doubt true that highly skillful lecturers can earn the kind
of engagement I have in mind. A good lecture, like a good essay or book,
demands the thoughtful engagement of everyone within earshot. It's also
painfully true that so-called discussions that simply drift, with no one
holding anyone responsible for saying anything worth saying, and no progress
made on some recognizable question, can leave students in a state even
more disengaged than when they are taking notes from a well-organized
lecture. Some decades ago here in our College, a group of teachers conducted
a careful experiment comparing lecturing and discussions. They chose a
group of teachers who were thought to be among the best lecturers, and
another group thought to be among the best discussion leaders. They then
did audio tapes of their classes, and played them back to individual students.
At regular intervals they would stop the tape and ask the student, "What
were you thinking about at that point?" Recording the incidence of distraction—"I
don't like the color of his tie; I don't like her hairdo; I can't think
what to say to my boyfriend tonight"—as compared to the incidence
of concentration on the subject, they got what was for them disappointing
results. They were enthusiasts for the glories of discussion classes,
and they found that the lecturers had the attention of more students more
of the time than did the discussion leaders. Shocking. So they went back
and asked a different set of questions, focusing on the incidence of active
thought about where the current topic should lead or about how to do something
with it. They found that discussions did considerably better than lectures
on that one. The bad news is that, as I remember it, neither lectures
nor discussions did very well—I think about the best anyone managed
was to keep about twenty-five percent of the students, on average, away
from distractions—though of course there were high points when nearly
a hundred percent were engaged, and other moments when almost no one was.
If there were time, I would be glad to offer you my short list of principles
for good discussion. But time is running out, so here are only a couple
that obviously follow from our principles:
- You've got to get them talking to each other, not just to you
or to the air.
- You've got to get them talking about the subject, not just having
a bull session in which nobody really listens to anyone else. This means
insisting on at least the following rule in every discussion: whether
I call on you or you speak up spontaneously, please address the previous
speaker, or give a reason for changing the subject.
- You've got to find ways to prevent your own relapse into a badly
prepared lecture disguised as a discussion. Informal lectures are usually
worse than prepared ones.
Second, certain practices follow for reading and writing assignments
and testing. I won't have time to talk about this, but I ask you to think
back on the assignments you have been given, and the testing you have
suffered—and then think about just how little of that pile of stuff
really engaged you in self education. My own thinking in this way leads
me to use fewer examinations, fewer quizzes, and more papers, including
frequent one pagers that require students to come up with pertinent questions
and possible answers to them. You don't know anything about a subject,
or anyway about most subjects, until you can put your knowledge into some
kind of expression. Trying to put it into a form of intelligible expression
is usually the best path to active engagement rather than obedient receptivity.
Finally, in this little list of untrustworthy generalizations, I would
urge you to resist planning too far in advance. Just how far is too far
may be hard to determine, but it is extremely difficult to teach engaged
responsibility when you have fixed all the fights from the beginning.
Leave room for improvisation, for improvisation even in the last minutes
as you are walking into class. It was Art Buchwald's teacher's improvisation
at a specific moment that leads him to honor her now. Leave the reading
list to some degree open, so that, when you discover an unusually well-prepared
or badly prepared group, you can shift gears. Above all, leave room for
your own learning—for the chance to discover and teach something
you didn't know when the course began. After all, our basic choice of
purposes here should apply to you as well as to your students: will you
want to continue learning about and teaching this subject a year from
now or ten years from now? Not if you've gained nothing from what happens
in the encounter, nothing more, that is, than the sense that students
came out with what you had when you went in. That's not enough; every
class should be for you as much as for the students, and it cannot be
that unless there are many moments of opening out into unforeseen learnings.
The art of teaching a given class or student a given body of data is
one thing. The art of building a life as a teacher is quite another. Good
teaching, whether judged as what is good for the student or for the teacher,
might be judged by a simple thought experiment that I sometimes conduct
for myself when I feel discouraged about how little my students seem to
learn. Picture either the student or yourself at the end of the year,
thinking back on the course, or at the end of four years, thinking back
on many courses. Word comes over TV or radio that the nuclear war we all
dread is upon us, that Chicago has been targeted by the enemy, that Star
Wars is failing as
badly as everybody of any sense predicted it would—we are doomed
to die horrible deaths in five minutes. Looking back on the year or years
of education in that final retrospective flash, would I say to myself,
"Damn it all, I did all that preparation for a future that will now not
come. All that career building—and no more career! I wish I had spent
my time on this or that other more valuable or pleasurable activity"?
Or would I, and would my students, be tempted to say something like, "Well,
if I had known what I now know—Oh, Oh! There goes the first blast,
off above Evanston—I would have spent these last years, these last
months, this last week just as I have done, on that most clearly self—justifying
of all human activities, learning how to learn"?
George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor,
Department of English Language and Literature, Committee on the Analysis
of Ideas and the Study of Methods, and the College, the University of
Chicago.
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