I was passing through Cologne this week, en route from the UACES Annual Conference in Trento (which was excellent, by the way). I’d decided to take the train – despite the slowness and cost – to show my support for more sustainable practices around conferencing, and because I like trains.
To help pass the time, I was blurping – or whatever it’s called on BlueSky – my travels. Which was good for me to get more practice using the site, and to think about the different stimuli a journey like that can produce.
Cologne matters here as the place where I was thinking about teaching and how I learnt to teach. At the conference, I’d had a couple of conversations about how I coped with having to do an after-dinner speech in my capacity as Chair of the Association, since they felt it to be a bit daunting.
Part of my answer then was just about practising and being confident in your ability to do it, but I also realised that another part came from learning from the practice of others. Hence this post.
Many years ago, as part of my undergraduate degree, I came to Cologne on a field trip with my Geography professor, who hoped we’d learn about urban geographies and the relationship to political organisation.
What I actually learnt was that my professor didn’t know how to eat a kiwi fruit.
“I always thought they were a bit hairy” he said, as I explained one breakfast time that the skin wasn’t for eating.
Of course, the other thing I learnt from this was that what you hope your students will get out of a learning environment isn’t necessarily what they will get out it. A point this professor had amply demonstrated in his lectures back home.
In these, he was well-known for stopping every 15 minutes, pointing at someone randomly in the room and asking them to stand up and summarise the key points of what he’d just been talking about.
The intention was clearly to incentive paying attention and to practice precising skills.
The result was (for me) learning where to sit in the room, since he was not actually that random in picking people out or (for others) learning how to ask someone for their notes, since they’d skip class.
On reflection – and I did reflect on it – the problem was that this professor hadn’t really paid enough attention to the maxim I try to make use of in any learning situation: students will take the path of least resistance, so make that path run through your learning objectives.
That can be either extrinsic – it’s on the test – or intrinsic – it’s really interesting/fun – motivation, but it needs to be there.
All of this reminded me of the other great teaching lesson I got at this early stage of my exposure to university education, this time from another professor.
This one would finish every class – and I mean every class – by saying: “oh, is that really the time? I still haven’t covered nearly everything I wanted to. I’ll come back to it next time.” And then never coming back to it.
Always. Stick. To. Time.
And if you promise to do something, do it.
All decent lessons to take away for our teaching practice.
Now to check how difficult it would be to sail to APSA TLC.
‘Bleeting, perhaps?