by Ashley Carr

I had my first big teaching realization about five minutes into the opening session of the Lilly Conference and the second about five minutes later. Really, just those two would have been valuable enough for the entire weekend, though there were many others. Perhaps because they were the first, they seem to be the ideas that stuck with me the most.

The very first big idea was about the role of the teacher in teaching students HOW to learn something. In fact, that may just be our most important role as teachers. This idea struck me as particularly true as related to my recent attempts to learn to play an instrument, the bass guitar.

I purchased my bass on a whim, after having those vague “I want to learn the bass” feelings for years. Then I was faced with the, “Now what?” I had a little music education from choir during Junior High, but otherwise no experience playing an instrument. I was essentially in the position of learning something new, almost from scratch. Learning music is very much like learning a new language. I had to learn everything from basic mechanics to vocabulary. It was more than a little intimidating.

As I do when I need to learn about something, I began by reading about it. I found a good website about the bass and started from there. I progressed, but very slowly.

Then I decided that I wanted to try lessons. And that is when the real progression started. My bass teacher was able to explain and show me things in a half-hour lesson that would have taken me a week to figure out. It had been so long since I had to learn something with little prior knowledge, I had forgotten how powerful it is to have a teacher guide your learning, pointing out the important things.

Then, in one of my lessons my instructor told me that it was time that I started learning a few songs on my own, and I realized that he had given me the basic tools to begin learning independently. I had learned how to learn in this context.

I made the connection between my experience and the experience of my students during those first five minutes at the conference. I teach first-time in college students and many of them, as one of my students once said, don’t know “how to college”. College is an entirely new experience for many of them and it is a pretty steep learning curve. They are learning the language of college and it is more than a little intimidating.

I’m lucky that the Effective Learning course allows me to focus almost exclusively on helping my students learn how to learn in the college environment. But it occurs to me that students could benefit from miniature “how to learn” lessons in every discipline. The best ways to learn in the sciences, techniques for observation in the visual arts, advice on ideas that should be memorized verses concepts that should be understood, etc. In addition to being experts in our disciplines, we are also experts in learning in those disciplines. I believe we can help students by tipping our hands and letting them see how we became the experts in the first place.

The second big idea is one that still has me pondering. It was: “What if students don’t know how to work effectively in groups because they have never learned?” Should we be teaching students the best ways to work within groups, rather than letting them figure it out on their own? My answer to this is yes, of course, we should teach them how to work in groups, but I’m not exactly sure how to go about it. I feel like I have only learned to work most effectively with other in the last five years of my professional life. So now I’m looking into group theory and strategies for effective group projects, but I also wanted to reach out and ask how other ACC Faculty are addressing group work in their classes. How are you teaching your students to work together?