Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

If the university is really interested in revising our LACC, and seriously rethinking and restructuring liberal education, then the AACU annual meeting is the place to send a bunch of committed faculty and administrators. While it is not perfect, the AACU has always been one of the go-to places for me when I want to learn more about higher education, innovative pedagogies, etc.

One of the workshops at the annual meeting has a fantastic title: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, written by Don Finkel (Heinemann, 2000), challenges faculty to think of teaching as a practice of designing intellectual experience for a community of students, rather than one of “telling.” Drawing from the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire, Finkel proposes a variety of teaching practices that put the material at the center of students’ experience in the classroom, such as the Conceptual Workshop – a practice that engages students in community dialogue and inquiry and gives them the opportunity to apply ideas to complex situations.

I am sure you have figured out the rationale for posting this in this blog, as opposed to my other blog: when we teach online, don't we teach with our mouths shut? That in the online mode we put learning in the front and center?

As I noted in a posting in my other blog,
In the Chronicle, [former Harvard president] Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview."
They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

Isn't online teaching and learning a part of the process of experimentation, gathering evidence, and fine-tuning our approaches? Or, have we just stopped doing science altogether? I hope not.

So, ready to head to the AACU meeting? It is right up the road in Seattle, in Jan 2009.