Teaching simply a matter of style

November 2, 2009 —

Vanguard Photographic/ James Fry, Nick Kaiser

A teaching style can flow from one method to the next, but a trend seems to exist between professors and their subjects.

Lectures. PowerPoints. Or maybe a little group work. Whether you like it or you hate it, professors always have their styles.

At one extreme, there’s the student-led classroom, where the professor’s presence is rarely felt. These teachers act as discussion facilitators rather than lecturers. At the other is the instructor-led one, where students rarely make a peep and teachers simply deliver, taking each lecture to parcel out their knowledge.

Perhaps the range comes as no surprise. About 300 faculty members teach in 34 departments, so variation is inevitable. What’s surprising, however, is how small the variations tend to be when you take a look at their fields.

It’s rare for instructors to fall neatly into one extreme. Most professors use a mixture of methods — lecture, in-class quizzes, spontaneous writings, smallgroup work, major group projects, multimedia presentations, VSpace posts and so on. In fact, these hybrid methods keep most instructors somewhere near the middle.

English professor Daniel Cook falls there squarely. He blends lecture, question-and-answer, small-group discussion and the occasional PowerPoint presentation into courses that are equal parts instructor- and student-centered.

Cook said he prefers “the Socratic method” of question and answer to encourage learning, rather than simple explanations. He also likes to use small groups, but not too often.

“Group work is particularly good for some things, but it can be a cop-out,” the English professor said. “It could become a way for teachers to pass some of the labor off on students.”

Cook said that student-led discussions must be somewhat controlled, or they may dissolve a class’ coherence. At the same time, he calls small groups a great tool for calling attention to the finer details in literature.

“I use small groups to slow the class down for a patient look,” he said, “and then I bring it back to the full group and accelerate things.”

Cook noted that his subject determines his method as much as his personal preferences do.

“Teaching literature is not the same as teaching history or math,” he said. “It’s more about teaching a method than teaching content.”

Yet variations in method exist within subjects, too. Janice Wolff is, like Cook, a professor of English. But Wolff’s style falls much further toward the “studentcentered” pole of the teaching spectrum.

Wolff is the model of the facilitator style.

“I try to situate myself not as a teacher, but as a consultant or co-learner,” she said. For example, when students are writing, she sits down and writes, too.

Wolff’s classes are interactive. There is some lecture, but more independent and small-group work. There also is a large emphasis on multimedia, including radio broadcasts and Internet videos. These all serve to make decentralized, student-directed classes.

“A student once wrote about me, ‘She teaches from the back of the classroom,’” Wolff said, with a laugh. “I think that is a good way to put it.”

Deborah Smith is another professor on the “student-centered” end of the continuum. Falling somewhere between Cook and Wolff, the teacher education professor described her group-oriented method as “reciprocal teaching.”

Like Cook, Smith said sees her role as the modeler of a practice.

“My method is to teach a method itself, by demonstrating it,” she said, “and hope that the students will translate that into their own classrooms.”

Smith’s classes still have textbooks and course packs, but very little lecture. “I allow students to explore on their own, and learn from each other,” she said.

Opposite Smith and Wolff are instructors who rule the classroom — classrooms where exploring on one’s own seems much less likely. These professors might lecture or write on a whiteboard while students rapidly take notes to keep up. Yet at this end of the spectrum, too, instructors usually use a blend of different methods to moderate the extremes.

Brett Hull teaches introductory economics courses that are instructor-centered. Hull said that a student-directed approach would be too time-consuming for his classes, which can range from 35 to 50 students. There’s so much to cover and too much to learn, he said. “So we have to move quickly.”

But the economics professor still is opposed to uninterrupted lecturing, which he said can turn students off.

“This class is very textbook-based, but I would be doing my students a disservice if I let it just sit on the page,” he said.

So Hull uses a variety of methods — papers, short responses and group presentations – in addition to his lectures. These projects use real-world examples of economic principles to demystify the subject.

“I want students to think of econ like poetry,” he said. “You can analyze it, but you need to step back to see how it’s everywhere, and that it’s beautiful.”

Chemistry professor Andrew Chubb’s classes are even more instructorfocused than Hull’s. Chubb explained that is simply the nature of teaching organic chemistry, and he has little leeway.

“I’d love a small-group approach, but there’s no time,” he said.

Chubb pointed out that his courses’ requirements for a passing grade are set by independent regulatory associations — a key reason why courses in the social and natural sciences lean toward the instructor-led pole.

“We send students to medical and graduate schools, and we have an obligation to ensure our students are prepared,” Chubb said.

Still, Chubb said he strives to make his lectures, sometimes four hours long, as engaging as possible. Rather than simply talking, he uses 3-D models and other visuals to aid students.

“PowerPoint has been a fantastic tool for me,” he noted.

Science professors such as Chubb and Hull emphasized the need to deliver large amounts of information to students limits their options of teaching style. Liberal arts and education professors such as Wolff, Cook and Smith stressed instead the teaching of a method itself, of teaching a process.

The one thing all the professors seemed to agree on was group grades for collaborative projects. Most showed outright distaste, and even those who give them, like Hull, expressed ambivalence, at best.

Cook was most direct.

“I don’t give them because I hated them in school,” he said. “I always felt like I was the one left holding the bag.”