The Circus Show

“Step inside! Teachers are taking their turn on the critiquing block! Students – it’s a free-for-all. Given them your comments! Teachers – be careful of those who aren’t doing well,” says the circus announcer, perched at the entrance to the Teacher Show. “Teachers on display!”

Teaching is scary, especially the first semester of this circus. It becomes even scarier with the looming semester evaluation where students have no boundaries and can basically attack. I think evaluations are good because they help you know how to improve. But how do you approach reading these evals? How much weight does the school put on what students say? How do you handle harsh personal comments?

My first point this week is how to handle the teaching evaluation and dealing with feedback. First Day to Final Grade talks about feedback from students related to grades, midterm evals, and end of course evaluations. The authors state that it is important to give students the opportunity to provide feedback about course topics, teaching styles, and classroom activities. The text also says that we need to respond in class to the feedback we receive. In regards to end of semester evaluations, we need to prepare ourselves because we will not make everyone happy. The authors also state that students who are disgruntled may also attack us personally.

First Day to Final Grade discusses on pages 172 and 173 examples of how to approach evaluation responses. I personally like a lot of these ideas and think they are good ways to approach them. I especially liked the suggestions of reading the comments with a friend and reminding myself that there will always be at least one who attacks. I think addressing mid-term responses from students lets them know that their input will be reviewed and that they do have some input in how the course is managed.

Moving from the Teacher Evaluation Game, I want to discuss discovery learning used in laboratory teaching. The discovery instruction model is one I’m wondering if I could implement into a regular classroom. Discovery teaching can be summarized by saying that the teacher attempts to guide students through a process and toward an outcome. Wilbert McKeachie writes in Teaching Tips that “discovery instruction seeks to make knowledge more personal for students” (page 269). I think this is an interesting concept because it seems it would push students to critically think about ideas but also provide an opportunity for them to experiment with how they approach solving a problem. To me, it seems like the discovery model places importance on the process that students go through to come to a conclusion and not focusing solely on the conclusion itself. I think one way I could implement this into a classroom would be to provide a hypothetical problem or situation, and ask students to list the steps they would go through to handle the situation, how they chose those steps, and what their conclusion/outcome is. One challenging aspect would be to make sure the material could be adapted into this style. I think something like this may work in a public relations or advertising class.

Act three of the circus is the Teacher Show. This section focuses on experiential learning from Teaching Tips, Chapter 21. Experiential learning developed from students wanting a classroom where they could have input (as compared to top-down or instructor driven) and where students learn information that is relevant and applicable to the field. McKeachie discusses the six different roles that teachers can assume and labels this as Teacher As Typology. I think this is an important model because it discusses the different roles that teachers can assume, such as the expert, facilitator, ego ideal, person, or the formal authority. These categories are important to think about because it reminds us of all of the different ways we can approach the classroom and students and how these approaches affect our students. I will only focus on two categories, facilitator and person.

The facilitator role allows teachers to help students understand and challenge their views. In this role, the teacher helps students find ways to move past initial anxieties, stereotypes, and reactions and expand their views to include more productive approaches. This concept is more focused on teaching in general and therefore could be applied to any field.

The other role that I find interesting is the person role. Teaching Tips describes this role and how it changes when a student becomes more than just a name in the class when interaction happens. I never thought about this boundary as a student and remember what it was like to discover my instructors were people with lives, who actually left school, and told jokes. I bring this up because last month I saw a couple of my students out and said hi. They looked shocked and bewildered, almost to the point that they were looking at me as though I were a circus show. It was like they forgot that aside from being their teacher I was still a person. The role goes both ways; our students are unique individuals as well. The key is understanding how to find the balance between being an instructor, a person, and still having the needed student-teacher boundary. I think one way to add in interaction and keep the boundary would be in a smaller class by doing an attendance question each day. I do this now, but had no reason other than when I tried to end this attendance approach, the students asked to keep the question. I agreed with them that it added something to the day.

Concluding today you have had a glimpse at The Teacher Evaluation Game, a unique way of approaching evaluations from students; Discovery Learning, challenging students to value the process of discovery; and The Teacher Show, realizing that teachers are people.

The Spectrum of Teaching Styles - this website focuses on different teaching styles, theory as well as additional resources about how to teach.

Cirque du Soleil