Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

by Jessamyn Neuhaus

Effective teaching requires much more than subject expertise: it requires effective communication with students and knowledge of how to best foster student learning.

Similarly, education professor Ana M. Martínez Alemán describes how the title of “professor” is a racialized one, and how this influences her teaching, noting that “to be a professor is to be Anglo; to be a Latina is not to be an Anglo. So how can I be both a Latina and a professor? To be a Latina professor, I conclude, means to be unlike and like me.”8

I had never heard this.

There are entire libraries of research about learning, and if we want to be effective teachers, we should know some of the basics. A good starting place is the seven “learning principles” identified by pedagogical researchers in the influential book How Learning Works: • Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning. • How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know. • Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do learn. • To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they’ve learned. • Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning. • Students’ level of development interacts with course climate to impact learning. • To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.29

GINs also need to understand some of the other well-documented facts about learning that impact our teaching, such as: • Sitting still and listening is not an effective way to learn. Yes, fellow scholars, I know you can learn this way and so can I, but most people need a lot of movement, interaction, and actual application of ideas in order to learn.30 • Students do not learn content by merely listening to us talk about the content, because “telling students information does not translate to learning.”31 We’re not the Matrix Operator uploading kung fu directly into Neo’s cerebral cortex, so we need to plan for effective lecturing by interspersing it with small group activities or note review or other types of activities. • Any type of learning must build on previous knowledge. For example, Stacy Bailey asks her literature students to think about their own first kiss to help them better understand Romeo and Juliet.32 • In addition to meaningful connections to previous knowledge, learning requires repeated practice over an extended period of time and frequent testing.33 • “Productive struggle” is an important part of learning because “trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.”34 • Learning is not a purely intellectual exercise. Emotions matter.35 To learn anything, students must occasionally be frustrated and experience failure, but they can’t get mired in that feeling. Students with a gro...

One of the best summary lists of this type I’ve ever seen.

We academic nerds have embraced a life of constant learning but when it comes to our students and to our own efforts to be effective teachers, we also have to keep remembering that learning is hard.

I need to be reminded of this.

On a related point, the stress and fear of being wrong and of not succeeding appears to be increasing among all new college students.48 Pedagogical scholar Rebecca Cox makes a convincing argument that fear of not succeeding academically and of not really “belonging” in college manifests in some of the student behavior that professors find most exasperating, such as not seeking faculty assistance, not reading the syllabus, and waiting until the last minute to begin assignments.49

I see this even at the day to day class level.

Contrary to the popular discourse about snowflakes overly protected by helicopter parents and society’s trophy-for-showing-up cult of self-esteem, academic entitlement most frequently manifests in students who are fearful, feel helpless, and who are “harboring doubt about their abilities.”54 Studies show that it is consistently associated with a student’s belief in an external locus of control over academic achievement.55 Many students believe that the power to do well in any one class depends not on their own individual effort or behavioral self-regulation or increasing their own skills but on factors outside their control. Namely, you, the instructor. Across many different teaching contexts, “students think classroom teachers are the most significant factor in student learning, and rank it ahead of their own study habits in importance.”56 They “see teachers as bearing all or a majority of the responsibility to educate and produce learning” and “students’ perceived powerlessness in their own education translates into a lack of their taking responsibility for their own education.”57

Effective teachers distribute “Prior Knowledge” surveys at the beginning of class or other types of questionnaires (and then read and reflect on the student responses); they ask students to meet with them individually at the beginning of the term; they create a variety of ways to learn as much as they can about students’ preparation and expectations for the class.60 So by whatever means necessary, we have to learn their names and learn a few things about each of our students.

Most of our students, even the ones who are earning good grades at elite universities, are not budding professional scholars.

One of my most important realizations ever was fully understanding this.

But if we want to be effective teachers, we must accept Vulcan philosopher Kiri-kin-tha’s first law of metaphysics: “Nothing unreal exists.” Or as the Vulcan proverb goes, kaiidth (what is, is). Awareness of what is, learning and continually relearning it, is foundational to effective teaching.

the four realities discussed in this chapter are essential: identity is important, learning is hard, who our students are, and who we are.

For all our brainy ability to deeply and thoroughly understand our discipline, when it comes to teaching we need to better understand the classroom as a social space. Content knowledge and even pedagogical content knowledge is not sufficient because “a teacher’s success not only depends on effective methods of teaching and subject knowledge but above all it depends on the strong relationships teachers develop with their students.”10 Or as another group of researchers puts it: “Student-teacher interaction is at the core of students’ classroom experience, even in online courses.”11 Moreover, we’re hampered by the very knowledge we’re attempting to share. It’s all too easy for professor GINs to come off as know-it-alls purposefully trying to make other people (i.e., students) feel dumb.

HALLMARKS OF EFFECTIVE TEACHING THAT CAN BE ESPECIALLY CHALLENGING FOR GINS • Care for students and student learning • Immediacy and rapport • Authenticity and enthusiasm • Clear communication of ideas and expectations

There are even options for those with teaching styles not particularly nurturing or supportive. These can be things as simple as an occasional kind comment, a bowl of candy set beside the student chair in the office, or conscientious responses to email queries. Expressions of caring should be genuine, but they can be varied and should fit comfortably with your teaching persona.15 The possibilities are indeed “varied” and “can be expressed in different ways,” but what caring about students really boils down to is being fair and treating students with basic courtesy and respect. Or as Ken Bain summarizes in What the Best College Teachers Do, effective teachers “tend to treat students with what can only be called simple decency.”16

Learning objectives are the broad goals and intended purpose of a class, a program, a major, or even the university at large. They express, often but not always in some detail, what educators hope students will achieve during a course of study. Learning objectives may or may not be included on any one syllabus, but learning outcomes are an essential component of effective syllabi, stating as clearly and specifically as possible, the identifiable content knowledge, skill, ability, and end-product of a student’s successful course of study. Learning outcomes are what students do (verbs matter) that we can then assess and measure in order to evaluate a student’s learning.65

As Linda Hodges and Katherine Stanton write, “Too often we provide students with the answers in our discipline before they even understand the questions.”67 In their discussion of how expert blind spots can hamper our ability to foresee what issues students will face, Hodges and Stanton describe the common occurrence of students complaining that “the exam problems were nothing like what we did in class”: These remarks may lead us to assume that students are not paying attention, are not spending enough time on assignments, or simply are not studying hard enough. In some cases these assumptions may be true, but another interpretation is that these student comments reflect the differences in the way novices approach problem solving compared to experts.68 Experts know how to apply the larger concepts in our field to specific problems. We can see how different types of problems require application of a particular solution method. But novice learners believe problem solving should be quick and easy because they have simplistic beliefs about learning and about knowledge. They focus on the answer, not the process. Therefore, “our problem-solving exercises for students must explicitly require them to spend meaningful time analyzing principles involved and envisioning how these same principles might be ‘disguised’ in other settings.”69

Even more irritating is the seeming inability of students to use what they have learned on any problem that is not an exact copy of the problem they used when they were learning it. This shows up frequently on tests, where students lament the use of tricky questions while the instructor thinks he or she is asking students to use information in a similar type of problem.70

Once we have our short list of what students should learn how to do and why they should learn how to do it, we must figure out how students will demonstrate/prove they’ve learned it. And we must be specific. What assignments, tests, or projects, specifically, will document their learning? And how? How will you assess it? “I’ll know it when I see it” is not fair to students. They deserve to know what we expect them to do and how they will show they can do it, and they deserve a clear and concise explanation. It boils down to telling students why. Why they’re doing this, why you’ve assigned that, why, why, why. We’re not the man behind the curtain trying to flimflam students into learning. Tell them what they are learning how to do, and how they will learn to do it.

Many students’ expectations of or prior experience with college classes entail teachers standing in front of the room and “telling.” Anything that deviates from this appears out of place and discomforts students for at least two reasons. First, all their experience says that our job is to do the talking, leaving them the choice of engaging with the subject or not. A second reason for their discomfort, however, is how they view the process of learning. Dualistic thinkers believe that gaining knowledge is as simple as listening to and repeating the views of an authority figure. . . . [Doing anything else seems like a] gross dereliction of our duty.”127

active learning will argue that it’s a “‘professor’s job’ to tell them what they need to know and to deliver a well-prepared lecture. Some students will even suggest that they have paid with their tuition dollars for their teachers to teach them. . . . They believe somehow that teaching is something that can be done only by the professor.”128 Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent describe this same common student reaction to learner-centered pedagogy, which is a radical change from teachers “telling them everything they needed to know from the first grade on. . . . When confronted with the need to take more responsibility for their own learning, students may grouse that they are paying tuition—to be taught, not to teach themselves.”

Resistance to active learning techniques expressed in negative SET is an entirely predictable response based on the students’ previous understanding of how school works. In order for SET to offer productive feedback, the SET forms we use have to take this reality into account because students themselves are often “satisfied with passive learning and don’t appreciate faculty who make them work for their grade beyond taking a multiple-choice test, especially not assignments requiring critical thinking and problem solving.”42

We can create our own types of forms or draw on the SoTL for forms such as the “Classroom Survey of Student Engagement” or the “Classroom Critical Incident Questionnaire.”61

When one of your favorite students asks you for a recommendation letter, send an unofficial copy to the student along with your thanks for the rewarding experience of being their teacher. You know the kind of student I’m talking about here: the one you were always happy to see in class because they had a genuine interest in your arcane field or they exhibited the kind of intellect and leadership that could elevate a whole class or they overcame truly daunting odds to succeed. In whatever way they gifted you with moments of teaching happiness, saying thank you to that student could be the start of a gratitude practice recognizing and personally thanking students who make teaching fun. Your first reaction might be that such students are rare, but once we get into a habit of looking for and recognizing them, we will almost certainly find them. In the words of Thorin Oakenshield, to find something, you have to look for it.

Whatever the mechanism, whether informal conversations or peer review or teaching portfolios or organized communities of inquiry, support for improving teaching is, at its heart, teachers talking to other teachers about teaching.7 Such conversations can take a wide variety of forms, from faculty learning communities to teaching squares to peer observations and review.8 Again and again, professors report that “communities of practice” and networks of support for teaching, tailored to address their specific teaching context, improve their own individual teaching efficacy.9

The more we employ the four pedagogical practices I’ve described in Geeky Pedagogy and the more time we can spend just doing them, the better we’ll get at effective teaching and advancing our students’ learning: • Awareness: working to be fully aware and accepting of who we are, who our students are, the complexities of identity, and the challenges of learning—and understanding that these realities are always evolving and changing. • Preparation: approaching teaching as an intellectual endeavor, putting on our professor pants, and carefully planning for interacting with students and conducting classes in order to best foster student learning in our subject—and understanding that preparation is an ongoing process we will do over and over again. • Reflection: viewing our teaching as an interesting and ongoing intellectual investigation and gathering as much evidence and feedback as possible to consciously and metacognitively explore what’s working and what’s not; applying the products of reflection to our teaching and learning work; perhaps trying a little gratitude along the way—and understanding that reflection is an ongoing process we will do over and over again. • Support: finding ways to engage in and learn from the scholarly work on teaching and learning, both in our individual context as well as the field at large; decreasing our isolation in the enterprise of effective teaching, joining a larger conversation about teaching and learning, and increasing our resources...

You probably arrived at college teaching via your nerdy love of a topic, and then maybe found yourself caring more than you ever thought you could about your students’ learning, after so many years of caring almost exclusively about your subject and your research. Making that realization and becoming an effective college teacher isn’t easy, and the longer I’ve been teaching, the more I realize how much I still have to learn—will always have to keep learning—about teaching.45 That’s practicing, and the practice of, effective teaching and learning.

Look up this reference.