by – Anja Ketcham

One of the mantras that I’ve lived by in my teaching career is that I can’t expect students to know a concept I haven’t taught them.  I teach composition, and even though students can write paragraphs when they get to my class, they rarely have a clear sense of what makes a paragraph.  Or they’ve been out of academia for so long that they don’t remember. So I start by defining what a paragraph is and what it needs. This technique serves me and my students well, but at some point, I got carried away with my information-based teaching.  I started viewing everything through the lens of definitions and knowledge.

It wasn’t until I read Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning by Davis and Arend that I started to rethink my approach. Their discussion of instructional objectives (those that occur at the lesson- or task-level) made me realize that the only objective my approach accomplished was giving students knowledge.  I was frustrated that students couldn’t take that knowledge and turn it into a successful product, but that was a different objective that I wasn’t preparing my students to meet. Those students who already knew how to turn knowledge into a product were doing well; students who didn’t felt enlightened in class but struggled as they tried to complete assignments on their own.

After reading Davis and Arend, I’ve tried to define specific instructional objectives for each lesson and design activities that meet those objectives.  This change required me to rework my lectures (mostly by trimming them significantly) and to devote more class time to activities. Initially, I was concerned about the changes: Would my students understand the trimmed-down information? Would the activities allow them to make sense of the concepts?

Earlier this week, I was running short on time in my class.  I realized that I could either run through a lecture about the structure of an upcoming essay or I could do an active learning activity where students looked at samples of the upcoming essay.  I could no longer do both. I chose the active learning activity; it’s called Great Examples and requires students to read a sample paragraph, discuss the strengths of the paragraph in small groups, and report two pieces of advice for achieving success on a similar assignment.

And, here’s the thing.  As a class, the students hit on every point my lecture would have covered. They recognized how the paragraph made use of textual examples.  They noted how the topic sentence carried through the paragraph and wrapped up in the final sentence.  They pointed out how the paragraphs tied to the overall purpose of the assignment.  At the end of class, I told them as much and a few of them chuckled in surprise.

Ultimately, my concerns about their ability to make sense of trimmed-down information proved unnecessary.  With the right balance, I can continue to teach by my mantra (a trimmed down version of it) and offer students more opportunities to surprise me and themselves.