The Moment I Changed the Way I Teach - Greg Crowther

The Moment I Changed the Way I Teach

Less Ice Cream and More Broccoli?! By Greg Crowther, Biology

My first quarter of teaching at EvCC -- Winter 2018 -- provided many opportunities for me to grow as an instructor.  My favorite one concerned the larger and chattier of my two Human Physiology (Biology 232) classes. This class asked LOTS of questions, and the questions were thoughtful and appropriate, so I tried to give them the attention they deserved. However, this made it hard for us to stick to our one-chapter-per-day schedule, so I often finished the week with a video lecture on the points we hadn't gotten to during lecture.

As we wrapped up the 7th week of the 10-week quarter, I semi-apologetically noted that I had fallen behind again and would need to provide another video lecture over the weekend. There were a few sighs of disappointment, as usual. And then Vince, a military veteran who rarely minced words, raised his hand.

“Hey Doc,” he said -- he always called me Doc -- “why don’t you just catch us up with a straight lecture on Monday, with no questions or interruptions allowed?”

I didn't especially like that suggestion, and I didn’t think that anyone else would, either. Did they really want to spend their Monday morning listening to me drone on for 100 minutes? Nevertheless, I acknowledged that a no-questions-allowed in-person lecture was a feasible alternative, and I put the issue to a class vote. Guess what they voted for?  Yup -- 100 minutes of droning! I was fairly shocked. It was almost as if the students had said, “Dr. Crowther, can you stop giving us so much ice cream, and, instead, can we have more broccoli?”

It took me a while to discern the full meaning of this vote.  The students didn’t really want me to lecture at them all day every day, of course, and they weren’t opposed to me taking any questions.  But they were signaling, with the only lever available to them, that they found the frequent tangents and pauses distracting and frustrating. I needed to keep us moving more steadily through the key content -- to get better at sorting questions into “worth covering right now” and “let’s talk after class,” rather than considering everything to be in the first category.

So what did I learn from this experience?  In part, this was a very specific lesson about the flow and pacing preferences of this particular group of students, which might or might not resemble the preferences of other groups.  But the broader lesson was that I should always solicit mid-quarter feedback from students, to get a better sense of what is and isn’t working for them, and to consider possible adjustments.

The next time my students seem to be requesting less ice cream and more broccoli, it will probably shock me all over again. But if l’m more intentional about collecting feedback, it will happen early enough in the quarter that I’ll have ample time to adjust the main course. Perhaps I can even make it a bit more of a potluck.