All Posts Tagged With: "lectures"

Victoria student Sol Kauffman says profs talk too much

Photo by Laura Mills

From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.

It’s 3 p.m. on a Monday and I’m sitting in my afternoon writing lecture. The professor has been reviewing PowerPoint slides for half an hour now. In one window of my laptop, I’m brewing ideas for the paper due at the end of this week; in another, I’m editing a photo shoot I did on the weekend. In my busy life, this is the perfect opportunity to get some work done. I half listen to the lecture, perking up when a question is asked. Lots of chairs in front of me are empty. Obviously the usual number of people are skipping class today. Maybe they’re sick, maybe they’re working a part-time job; hell, maybe they just slept in. In front of me, I see a student on Facebook, another writing in her journal, another texting on a phone. I know these students and they’re strong writers; I’m confident they’ll all pass with at least a B+. It’s not that the assignments are easy. On the contrary, we’ll all spend some sleepless nights grinding away at them. So why are so many of us absent, physically or mentally, from lectures?

Continue reading Stop lecturing students

Sometimes no notes are the best kind for lecturing.

You can tell a lot about a university instructor from the notes that he uses in class. When I was an undergraduate my friends scoffed at profs who dragged out yellowed sheaves with text that had been pounded out on a manual typewriter decades before. By contrast, they revered those teachers who lectured brilliantly with no notes whatsoever. I never wanted to be the former, and now I am working at being the latter.

When I gave lectures as a graduate student, I prepared detailed notes for every class with full sentences and key words in bold. Just starting out, I was deathly afraid of seeming unprepared, or, worse, forgetting where I was and not knowing what to say, or worst of all, of running out of material before the class ended. Like all grad students, I feared deep down that I was a fraud and would be found out at any minute. I would psych myself up on the way to class by assuring myself that I was well prepared, and if I was going to be exposed as a fraud, it would not be today. So my notes offered a kind of security. I didn’t just read from my script, but I had the script there, just in case. In fact, if I got too nervous and forgot what I was going to say, I would read a few lines from what I had prepared and that would get me back on track.

That practice continued when I became a professor because, again, you want to make a good impression, and nothing makes a worse impression than seeming inexpert on the topic you’re supposed to be an expert in. Or so I thought. But a few years in, I had an experience that changed my attitude. I was preparing to teach a play I had not taught before and was pressed for time. I simply did not have the hours to prepare the kind of notes I always prepared before. And so, in desperation, I made only a brief outline for each of the scenes I wanted to talk about and the main ideas I wanted to address. As I went to class, much of my old grad-school anxiety came back, and I feared the worst. But to my astonishment, the class went better than any class that year. Without detailed notes, I spoke more freely about the play and students picked up on it. Since I was not so bound to my notes, the students felt more free to raise questions and make contributions, because they sensed they were not interrupting me.

That class marked a gradual turn in my teaching style and over the years I have come to rely on notes less and less. Even when I had notes prepared from years past — not yellowed but well-used — I relied on them less frequently, and in many classes, I had an old lecture prepared which differed significantly from the lecture I had come to give. Now, when I teach a new text, I often make only annotations in the margins of the book itself to remind myself of key points and talk without notes at all. It turns out that I actually know quite a bit about this subject I have spent my life studying, and finding enough to say simply isn’t a problem anymore. Moreover, not reading from notes leads to not standing in one place and sometimes not standing at all. And with their prof more relaxed and informal, students feel all the more willing to engage with with the text at hand. It’s less a lecture and more a guided conversation which is what I always wanted anyway. The new format actually takes more time because there is much more questioning and discussion.

Teaching in this less formal way has meant a change to the way I give exams. Since the factual material presented in class comes less systematically and more organically, I can’t rely on having covered a specific set of facts in any given week or even any given term. So my new exams will have fewer questions about specific knowledge and more questions that invite the application of a range of knowledge and skills. Such tests may be a little harder for students, but I’m hopeful that the more lively classes will better prepare them for these kinds of evaluations.

All this has worked in my case, and has come as a part of a process of constant reflection on how I want to teach, but I hasten to point out that a no-notes approach may not work for everyone. I’ve had profs who stuck close to their notes and were riveting. I’ve had others who should have had notes to stick to.

But as for me, it has been 15 years since I gave my first lecture, and I have never felt less like a fraud.

These innovative and dedicated professors are Canada’s best

Baljit Singh, a professor of anatomy at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine, laughs about it now—but during his first year as a veterinary student, he failed the very course he now teaches. “I always tell my students,” says Singh. “I use it as a very inspirational example. I say, ‘Look, this is what happened to me in my first year. And I ended up teaching anatomy.’”

Singh, the one-time academic bungler, has since gone on to receive numerous academic distinctions, and is one of 10 professors named this year to the 3M National Teaching Fellowship. The award was established 24 years ago by 3M Canada in collaboration with the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Maclean’s has been the award’s media partner since 2006.

These new fellows join an elite club that now includes 238 professors. To win, it’s not enough to be merely a great teacher. “We’re looking for personalities, for people who are authentic, who are passionate—and Baljit is a great example,” says program coordinator Arshad Ahmad, a Concordia University business professor and a 3M fellow himself.

For all 10 3M National Teaching Fellows for 2009, click here.

Singh attributes his pedagogic success to the teachers in his own life. “They have built a fire in my mind,” says Singh. “This is the power of a teacher—once you are hooked up with an outstanding teacher, half the battles are won.”

The 3M National Teaching Fellowship rewards great teaching, and the teaching leadership required to share innovations with the broader educational community. Fellows are regularly brought together to exchange ideas, making the club an incubator for new teaching techniques. In June, they will gather in Fredericton; in November, this year’s inductees will attend a retreat at the Fairmont Le Château Montebello in Quebec. “We bring these people together to get to know each other as teachers and learn from each other,” says Ahmad. “There they are using their cutting edge stuff and sharing it, mentoring others to follow in those footsteps.” Here are a few that will be among them:

Glen Loppnow, Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta

“This is the extract from thousands of fireflies,” jokes Loppnow. Before a class of rapt first-year science students, Loppnow pours a beaker of bleach into a bottle containing the chemical luminol. The result, known as chemiluminescence—what a firefly does inside its glowing tail—transfixes his students. “No fireflies were harmed in this experiment,” Loppnow promises, before outlining how the energy of the chemical reaction has been converted into this blue, otherworldly light. That illuminating glow is a nifty metaphor for Loppnow’s brand of teaching excellence.

Loppnow admits he wasn’t always a great teacher. Had you caught one of his lectures a decade ago, he says, “you would have seen somebody whom the students considered mediocre and grumpy. I was rapidly getting a really bad reputation.” Caught up in the imperatives of research, Loppnow realized he was neglecting his real passion. “I was really denying my true self,” he says. “I really wanted to be a teacher.”

As a kid growing up in a tough neighbourhood in New Mexico, university didn’t appear to be in the cards for Loppnow. No one in his family had gone beyond Grade 12. But it was a high school English teacher, Susan Frye, who saw promise and encouraged him to apply to college. He got in, eventually doing graduate work at Berkeley and Princeton. Frye “changed my life,” says Loppnow. “That’s really the transition from my being a truck driver—which is what I thought I was going to be—to being a professor.” After the death of his father, Loppnow took an introspective sabbatical and realized what he needed to do to change his life—concentrate on teaching as much as on research. “I wanted to change students’ lives the way that my life had changed.”

Not to jinx myself, but…

Up until today, everything I knew about university was second-hand. For years, I’ve heard adults describe university as a place to, “discover yourself.” A place to “define who you are,” and, “explore your future.”

University kind of sounded like an artsy movie.

I figured that after sitting through official university lectures, I’d be Changed as a Person. I’d willingly read Hamlet, and probably say stuff like, “How could I not have recognized the poetic intricacies of Shakespeare’s prose before?”

Heck, I’d be able to legitimately use the word, “prose,” in a sentence.

I thought that after a whole day of university, I’d have a Confucius quote memorized for any given situation. If someone gave me a hard time on the bus, I could tell them that, “He who seeks a path of violence begets only a hallowed spear.”

But my high school-adapted mind made foolish assumptions about university. For one thing, the biggest change I noticed between high school and university has nothing to do with my Inner Core or Sense of Self: mainly, I noticed that people have an enhanced sense of body space in university.

Nothing in existence moves slower than a pack of grade nine students (other than plot lines from movies made in the 70’s). But in university, Slow Walkers are almost nonexistent. The almost-extinct species no longer travels in packs. The rare herd of Slow Walkers will actually acknowledge the fact that someone is walking behind them, and then will diverge to let them past. People hold doors for each other.

The best thing about being an official university student, though, is impressing all of my 12-year-old brother’s friends.

Yup, they’re in awe of my four months of summer vacation.