Collective learning
At its best, teaching provides me an experience of genuine collective learning as my students and I push past initial impressions and understandings toward unexpected and often fascinating revelations.
Engaging students
I always try to take everyone's ideas seriously. This doesn't mean agreeing with them or simply acknowledging them, and certainly not offering them empty praise, but it means engaging with them, taking a student's thoughts, however tentative and uncertain, and pressing on them, for their sake and for my own. I think that this is a prerequisite to any real teaching, as it establishes that our primary relationship will be one of authentic intellectual exchange.
Using technology in the classroom
I have recently experimented with the use of collective hypertext projects as a means of encouraging collaborative writing and revealing interconnections between related topics in a class. This more nearly duplicates the productive dialogue between students and me that seems so important in the classroom. It also produces a more public and engaged form of writing that bears a closer relationship to the kind of writing most students will be asked to do in later professional and public settings. |
