Classroom Dynamics can pose special challenges for seminar leaders. Here are skills and techniques to develop:
LISTENING
Listening is an instinctive sensory habit. However, being a responsive listener is a skill that one must practice to perfect. In terms of teaching, this is the act of paying close attention to what anyone, and everyone, in the class has to say. Seen this way, listening becomes the vital link that establishes a positive dynamic of “give and take” between teacher and student — and among students as well. Within the context of teaching a first-year seminar, you need to get used to checking with your partner to make sure that you both heard the same thing.
Here are some important keys to good listening in the setting of a first year seminar.
1. Pay Attention to the Particulars. This is more complex than it sounds. It involves not only grasping the general sense of the content of what someone has to say, but also apprehending the connective logic employed, the point of view, and important allusions, or references, assumed to be generally recognizable.
2. Listen to the Tone. The way a statement is voiced can carry as much meaning as what is being said. For example, the degree of authority, or doubt, with which an answer to a question is given has a measurable impact on how it is received.
3. Listen for Emotions. An instructor also needs to pick up on how a student feels about some- thing as it is to gauge how much he or she knows about it. A speaker’s emotional involvement may get in the way of real learning, or may enhance it.
4. Listen Relationally. Learn to listen for how a comment relates to the overall discussion. Can you tie it back to what someone else just said, or use it to make another point? Can you use it to engage the respondent in a dialogue with a student with a differing view?
5. Listen with a Purpose in Mind. You also need to be alert a response providing you with an opportunity to move the discussion along. Does a certain answer offer a bridge to a question that you wanted to include, one that probes deeper into the complexities of your subject?
6. Gauging Their Mood. You can quickly get a reading on unspoken group responses by listening for context. Have they prepared? Are your questions working, or are students frustrated because they can’t sense what you’re after? What isn’t being said?
RESPONDING
How you respond to the answers put forth by your students completes the “feedback loop”: the establishment of a supportive and challenging learning environment.
1. Keeping the Ball in Play. Rather than automatically commenting after every answer, pick appropriate moments to ask someone else in the class to do so. This breaks down the dynamic of attention always coming back to the you and promotes direct student interaction.
2. Positive Reinforcement. All responses, whether correct or not, should be handled in a supportive manner. This helps create a safe environment for students to speak out and try new ideas. Reinforcing correct responses can be done with a gesture or facial expression that signals approval or appreciation for the effort made by a student in answering a question. Additionally, you can exhibit your sense of a comment’s value by writing it on the board and then asking for follow up responses.
You should never tease a student for giving a wrong answer.
3. When Students Ask Questions. A very effective strategy when students ask questions is to get them to find answers for themselves. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying to a student, “that’s an interesting question, I’m not sure what the best answer would be. Can anyone else help us out?” As will inevitably happen, when arguments develop, try to resolve them by appeal to evidence — to the facts — not by relying on authority of position. If the dispute is over values, make it clear that differences must be respected, even if resolution is not possible. Disputes can often form the basis for library or writing assignments.
EMPLOYING THE TECHNIQUES OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION
The influence of conflict resolution as an approach to group interaction is being felt more and more in education circles. The application of conflict-resolution techniques to the setting of the small-group class is related quite organically to the concepts just presented with regard to listening and responding. In fact, the basic tenet of conflict resolution is getting the parties involved in a dispute to sit down together and listen to what each other has to say.
Such a setting, as we hope it would in the classroom, becomes a vehicle for creating mutual understanding and respect. The various methods of conflict resolution — negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and diplomacy — are all rooted in a process that values dialogue and the need for active listening. Ultimately the goal of conflict resolution is the emergence, out of an exploratory process, of enlightened solutions — ones built on a learned sensitivity to the views and ways of others.
Applications. The potential uses of conflict resolution for peer teaching in the first-year seminar programs fall into two categories.
The first is its application to “process,” to the adoption of a teaching style that incorporates the mindset of a facilitator enabling the members of the group to find their own ways of working through points of contention. Such an approach to teaching is embedded in many of the techniques presented in this manual — from brainstorming to role-playing to the listening/response loop.
The second is its value as a source of specific, content-related activities that can be developed for use in the classroom. An example of this might be constructing a mock negotiation in an Exploration on new media. Students could take on the roles of Senate and House staff members from both parties, working as part of conference committee, who have been assigned the task of hammering out a mutually acceptable draft of a bill dealing with the regulation of speech on the Internet — and who represent widely divergent views on how best to create such a policy.
GETTING FEEDBACK
The concept of “feedback” when applied to teaching and learning signifies the effort to create procedures whereby students in a course voice their perceptions of how the course is going, doing so on a regular basis and with the understanding that their teachers will listen to what they have to say and, where appropriate, will act on it.
The Two-Minute Assessment. One very effective feedback method is to leave a couple of minutes at the end of class and have students write down — with or without including their names, as seems best for your class — what they understood the main point of today’s class to be. Similarly, you could ask them to write about questions left unanswered, or any other frustrations they may have had with the class meeting.
By encouraging students to tell you how they feel about the course, and by responding to what they have to say, you are signaling to them that, indeed, you are serious about having them share in the responsibility for the education that goes on in your seminar.
Using Feedback Forms. Handing out photocopied feedback forms at the end of class is a variation that may work to elicit more focused responses in certain seminars. Here are some typical questions that have been used on such forms over the years.
- Is there some aspect of the subject we covered today on which you’d like to spend more time?
- What was your response to the in-class activities we did tonight?
- What are special issues, concerns, or questions that you would like to see raised in class next week?
Mid-Semester Evaluations. Around the sixth week of the term, all ExCollege courses do mid-semester evaluations. These are intended to be a vehicle, internal to your seminar, by means of which students and teachers can talk to one another in a cooperative fashion about the mutual endeavor in which they are engaged. In contrast to the quick, though useful, end-of-the-class critiques mentioned above, Mid-semester evaluations allow for a more extended and somewhat more thoughtful assessment by your students.
In turn, you should be prepared to take seriously what your students have to say and, if appropriate, make changes in the direction of the seminar.
Thus, the questions that you ask should be quite specific to concerns that you have or that have been expressed by the students. The more care that goes into framing the questions you want to ask, the more beneficial will be the information you receive back from your students.
DISCUSSING CAMPUS ISSUES
A significant element of the education that goes on in first year seminars has to do with introducing your students to the currents of community concern on campus. When doing your lesson plans from week to week, you should always be aware of the need to set aside some time, if appropriate, to address issues that have come up. Such discussions can be shaped around articles and/or opinion pieces in the newspapers, or could be focused on topics suggested to you by the Experimental College and for which there may be pamphlets or media materials.
First Year Problems. You should plan to address on a regular basis areas of concern particular to first year students. Most important are the following:
- Homesickness at the beginning of the semester
- Complaints about the social life on campus
- Interacting with your faculty adviser
- Studying and stress especially around midterms
- Parents Weekend and Thanksgiving
Getting Involved. A number of recent studies have shown that students who get involved in campus activities and organizations early in their college careers do significantly better than those who stay on the sidelines. Such studies should help ease student fears about not having enough time to devote to course work. It seems clear that people find time.
Talk to your students about opportunities on campus to do something important. You may spark an involvement that transforms the rest of a student’s four years at Tufts.