Supportive (and effective!) teaching strategies

Anastasia has a great post today about teaching strategies, specifically how to get students to respond and participate in class. She is responding to a teaching seminar in which the speakers encouraged what I consider to be a hostile, or at the very least stressful, classroom environment in which the teacher puts students on the spot, motivating them through fear of humiliation. I have experienced classes like this and I, like Anastasia, am very much opposed to this strategy.

The teaching strategies that I have developed in my four years of experience at a college level have (and that I am, of course, always re-evaluating and adapting) have been based on a student-centered classroom, light on lecture, heavy on real teacher-student, student-student, and student-text (in lit classes) interaction. And I have actually won a "Bravery in Teaching" award at my university based on these strategies. I believe the way I teach calls for bravery (well, any teaching calls for bravery) because I rely heavily on my students' fulfilling their responsibilities. I am always prepared to shift gears in case of emergency, but I have found that emphasizing the students' responsibility to the class as a whole has motivated them to prepare and participate because I earnestly believe in all my idealism that they feel invested in the class and in their own learning experience.

All this is very abstract, and I don't want to get into a long description of how I teach--maybe I'll do a series of installments on this topic, which is very important to me and I know to many of you who read this. I will offer here just a couple of examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.

First, I think that a major problem is students feeling insecure about talking in front of the class and even about talking to the teacher--they are afraid of looking not-smart--I know this because I am also afraid of looking not-smart! I have tried to assuage some of these fears by asking students to prepare questions or discussion points, often in the form of very short and informal writing assignments--like reading journals. If students have prepared some coherent thoughts before class, they are much more comfortable offering those up to the group. I also like to divide the class up for small group discussions that culminate in a larger group session. When they talk things out in a groups of four or five, it always leads to fruitful discussion when we bring the class together, and I can direct that larger discussion toward the major points that I think they need to understand.

My favorite writing assignments, and based on my evaluations, my students' favorites, as well, are wide-open response papers. I tinker with the title of these projects all the time, but I have not yet found a title that satisfies me. The best way I can describe it is, "Here's what I care about that I didn't get to say already." I require several of these over the course of a semester, and they always get better as the semester goes on and students feel more comfortable expressing themselves. The only requirement is that they demonstrate thoughtful interaction with a text. They usually do this by writing papers about, as I said, the things they were thinking and didn't say in class, but others have produced impressive creative and artistic projects in other media. Some students have given their projects to me to keep after the semester is over, and I love sharing them with other teachers. These projects do not weigh heavily on their grade, and I emphasize that I do not intend for them to spend hours and hours preparing them, but they appreciate the opportunity they have to communicate what is important to them, as opposed to what I deem important in the class. That enthusiasm, I believe, carries over into our everyday classroom activities.

I have taken great pride in drawing out students who hesitate to participate through methods that are student-friendly and non-threatening. Kudos to Anastasia for bringing this issue directly to her students and letting them tell her what works for them.

Edited to clarify: There's a difference between "challenging" and "threatening"--I want my classroom to be non-threatening but I also want my students to feel challenged and to step out of their comfort zones. I feel that fear of humiliation is not the best way toward that goal. I have found that once a student feels comfortable joining the conversation in the first place, it is much easier to engage that student in new and challenging discussion.