After teaching college for ten years, some days I feel like a wrinkled old pro, but many days I still find the practice of conveying information to young people to be as mystifying as it is, no doubt, mystical. Maybe this is why I still obsessively read articles on teaching on my way to teach, in between classes while eating a sandwich, on my way home while I should be grading. I like to anatomize this riddling practice to which I’ve dedicated my life, to study the structure of its internal workings even as I’m performing them.
One thing that bothers me, though, is how many pedagogy articles on what works for students in the classroom fail to actually ask the students what works for them in the classroom. So I asked high school students (from my Barnard Pre-College Program creating writing classes) and college students (from my Fordham English classes) what helps them learn.
This essay is for all teachers, but especially the ones who obsessively read articles on teaching on their way to teach, in between classes while eating a sandwich, and on their way home while they should be grading. But, above all, this essay is for my students, whose mystical, mystifying ways give meaning to my life to a degree I haven’t even found words for yet.
What I found surprising was that there was no great chasm between what high school students and college students want in the classroom. It’s wonderful to construct creative, rigorous lesson plans, but it seems that the number one thing students want is for their teachers to connect with them in personal but also pedagogically meaningful ways.
High school student Joely Metz writes:
Something that I find really important when it comes to teaching is when the teacher has fun in class. I have always believed that relating to the students is extremely important. When my teachers take the time to talk about funny stories that happen in their lives I feel more connected and I respect them more because I see them as a mentor and as someone who went through similar experiences. I feel more comfortable in class because I feel I can relate and that I automatically have someone I can talk to and someone I enjoy being around because I get to know them as a person.
As high school student Livia Blum puts it,
Dates and facts and numbers and figures do not make up the world. People do. The best teachers I’ve ever had (and I’ve been lucky enough to have many of them) have reminded me that I am also a person. That my opinion matters. The best teachers I’ve ever had are the ones where grades came last. Where first they wanted to know me and gain my trust. They wanted me to really care about what I was learning, not just about the outcome I got on an assessment. They asked me about my life and listened when I answered them. The best teacher I ever had was my history teacher in 10th grade. She was profoundly curious. She was patient, passionate and persistent with her belief in each one of us and she was the first teacher I ever had who made me realize that I mattered in my own learning. That it wasn’t just about the facts and the dates and the names of the leaders, but about the lives that surrounded those things and about my life too.
College student Matthew Matthias writes,
It is the teachers who love what they teach, and truly want their students to succeed that help foster self-motivation for students. The key to teaching students is involvement. The classroom is a vessel for individual intellectual growth and professors are supposed to facilitate this self growth and pour into it like watering a flower, not pasting it on like a sticker. From my experience, when a teacher has a certain motivation or charisma in the classroom this becomes infectious and helps the students grow and learn more effectively. My advice to teachers all around is to show and infect your students with the passion of your course, and help foster an interactive, academically stimulating classroom, whether this be through group projects, discussion, fun games, field trips, or short videos.
High school student Anna Roberson echoes this, adding the importance of dialogue over monologue in the classroom:
In high school I’ve noticed that the teachers I like are the ones that tend to reveal themselves a little more. To know more about my teachers’ lives and to view them in other ways than as just my teacher helps me to relate and look up to them more. When teachers make an effort to show that they care about my success and progression, it makes me strive harder. I think that overall I wish teachers would talk to their students more. I would like learning to be more of a conversation, because I think life is a conversation. I want teachers to learn from my ideas as I learn from theirs.
All the students I heard from wished teachers would engage students in multifaceted ways, favoring the questions over the answers, dialogue over monologue, and many perspectives over just one. College student Tyler Rozier writes, “In my experience, the kind of assignments that work for me are the assignments that do not have one particular answer. They are assignments that allow students to question the work they are doing while learning.” Of the best class she ever had, Blum writes, “I learned in that class to reflect before I said something, to consider how a topic was making me feel before I started to analyze it,” and of the best teacher she ever had—in that same class—Blum writes, “She was honest and she looked at everything from every perspective.”
Students particularly value when teachers share parts of their own lives with them. But what they want above all is for this connection to be correlated with a creative, rigorous teaching method. Essentially, students want us to connect with them, but particularly in ways that aid instruction.
There’s a tendency in the study of teaching to think, that’s all well and good, but how does this connection work pedagogically? I think this is where educators and administrators sometimes forget how students actually think—not that I can ever truly know either, which makes me just as much of a windbag, albeit a well-intentioned one. But here’s the thing that occurs to me after years of teaching and asking students about their educational experience: it’s not that students favor connection instead of pedagogy, but to the students (and I believe to the dedicated teacher) the connection is the pedagogy.
Blum goes on to stress how teachers’ connections with their students take wing pedagogically:
We need more teachers like that teacher I had. Teachers who not only care about the students around them, but show them they care. Teachers who encourage thought and curiosity and independence. Teachers who value emotion and personal connection and who see it not as a hindrance to learning, but an imperative part of it. If we are given the freedom to understand how we connect or relate to something in the classroom, we suddenly want to know more about it. We learn to be interested in ourselves and what affects us and then we learn to be interested in each other, in our world, in the politics of right and wrong.
College student Minjie Shen takes us deeper into how connection can align with pedagogy. She shares, “I really liked my calculus professor last semester. He was a really funny and interesting guy. Even though calculus is hard to understand, he tried to make it interesting by telling jokes and telling stories. And he also told us something about his personal story, such as how he learned math.” Here we can see how this professor in particular used the sharing of his own story as a teaching tool. The magic is this: by letting his students into the story of how he came to calculus, he seamlessly helps them come to calculus themselves.
Indeed, this sense of connection with the students in tandem with ingenious lesson planning renders an instructor unstoppable. If you really want to see supernatural events in the classroom, unite the two: correlate your brilliant lesson plan with the way you’re choosing to connect to the students while teaching it and watch what happens. You and your students will never be the same.
Even more poignant still—enact all this with a particular focus on who your students actually are. That is, reveal who you are, find out who they are, and teach towards the overlap you discover. As Rozier says, “The kind of teachers and teaching philosophies that have worked for me are the teachers who put the students first. Teachers who teach towards the benefit of the students and allow students to guide the course or lesson in a particular fashion.”
As Blum sees it,
We need more teachers who don’t teach to the book, who create their own curriculum, who bring to the surface silenced voices and diverse points of view. My 10th grade history teacher was the first teacher I ever had (and think I may ever have) who taught the rise of Hitler through a queer lens. Suddenly, my history mattered. Suddenly, I felt I existed. When I felt safe in that classroom, I could open up to the people around me more than I ever had. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions, to be proud of my identity and to approach the subject matter in that class from perspectives I didn’t understand. I was braver.
It seems students also experience a teacher’s stance on sensitivity and identity more powerfully when he or she integrates it into the architecture of the class—the way the class is run and the lesson plan structured—rather than merely asking what pronouns students prefer the first day and then never asking them about themselves again. As Shen writes, “I think race and gender are not issues if the teacher really respects each person without any bias. But if the teacher himself has the bias in his heart, he can’t be inclusive on issues of race and gender no matter what he tries.” Ultimately, the sensitivity to identity issues needs to be integrated with thought and care into not only the lesson plans but also into the living, breathing entity that is the classroom.
As Blum says, “Our teachers role model for us the ways in which we should move through the world. I wish more people really understood this. If we learn to value percentages, grade points and results above everything else, this will be our focus for the rest of our lives. If we learn to value the experiences of others, critical thinking, kindness, patience and truth, suddenly the journey of our lives becomes infinitely more important.”
In terms of the importance of sharp, thoughtful assignments that allow the students to reflect on their own identities, high school student Melody Zhou shares,
My AP US History teacher gave us the opportunity to spend the majority of the school year researching a topic of our choice and writing a paper on it, encouraging us to choose a topic we genuinely cared about. Last fall, I had followed the emergence of the #MeToo movement with great interest. Initially, it was hard to imagine a time when women didn’t have a feminist movement to unite behind, and I wanted to know more about the women who made gender equality a cause. Thus, I formulated my research question: “To what extent did Students for a Democratic Society impact the Women’s Liberation Movement?” . . . Writing this paper was a transformative experience for me not only because I gained a more nuanced understanding of feminist history, but I learned how to form my own opinions and craft arguments to defend them – essentially to be an independent thinker. I wish I had more assignments like this one.
Shen writes, “Our English professor showed us a video from Nick Vujicic. I felt really touched after watching the video, and our assignment after this class was to write an essay about Nick, our life challenges, and how we would deal with those challenges if we were Nick. I really learned a lot from that class, including how to respect people with disabilities. Because if I were Nick, I would hope others would respect me as well.”
College student Cameron Kellett synthesizes all the aforementioned perspectives quite nicely when she writes,
I think teachers can be more inclusive on issues of race and gender by making an effort to incorporate works that discuss these issues that are written from a minority’s perspective into the syllabus. I also respect how some teachers will dedicate a course for the sole purpose of studying these issues. I took a course called Malcolm X and MLK with Dr. Mark Chapman, and I respect how after acknowledging that African American women often go unrecognized for their contributions to the civil rights movement that Dr. Chapman decided to create a class called African American Women for this sole purpose. I also think when teachers share some of their experiences it can make the learning experience more insightful.
As Metz says, “I don’t think [teachers] will earn the respect of their students if they don’t want to have a relationship with them. The teacher is a guide and I feel that you can either follow the guide or walk beside them.”
This is part of a series, Adventures in Pedagogy. You can read previous essays here:
Teaching Your Students to Become Textual Flâneurs
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent to Young Kids and Vice Versa
Pedagogical Resources
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Pedagogy Unbound
The New York Times Learning Network
Academy of American Poets: Teach This Poem
The Derek Bok Center For Teaching and Learning at Harvard
Northwestern Searle Center For Advancing Learning and Teaching
University of Michigan Center For Research on Learning and Teaching