Most classrooms are designed the same way as theatres. Typically, there is a performance space separate from the audience space; one for the teacher and the other for the students. Not coincidentally, the larger the lecture hall the more evident the need to put on a rousing performance for those in attendance. Because of the structural (and even social) similarities between the classroom and the theatre, university instructors could bear to learn from the dramaturgical expertise of actors. While straight lecturing is only a single modality of teaching, it is a modality that can greatly benefit from training in oration and stage performance. This was my reasoning, at the very least.

This past week I attended a workshop on Acting Tips for Teachers, led by the exceptional Hala Baki, a Doctoral Scholars fellow in the Department of Theater and Dance at UCSB. The room was cleared of its chairs, we stood (shoes optional) and waved our arms, and we shouted across the room at one another – in other words, the workshop matched perfectly with my imagination of an LA acting class. All jokes aside, these various exercises were devised to train specific aspects of performance for those who ply a trade on a stage: mastery of the body, mastery of breath, and mastery of speech.

In addition to exercises that cultivated these skills, another regular refrain made a lasting impression. In our role as performative lecturers we need to disrupt predictable patterns and break the “fourth wall” in as many ways as possible. We can break them down with our voice, break them down with our body, and break them down with our physical presence. Through employing physical and vocal animation, or even storytelling and suspense, we can stimulate our students instead of lulling them to sleep by the monotony of our voice and flickering of our slides.

Furthermore, woven throughout the workshop were subtle hints reminding us to make the lecture classroom an active learning environment. The structure of the classroom (and its theatre cousin) can overdetermine social interaction, namely, that students should remain quiet and listen like a audience. A good teaching performance should not only grab attention, but encourage “audience participation,” having students engage, think, and communicate. By breaking the fourth wall we are breaking the presumptions of student passivity.

The initial workshop exercises worked on developing our posture and breathing. Using a basic scanning method (based on the Alexander technique), we made sure our standing posture was balanced and erect, thus demanding attention and channeling confidence. And breathing from the diaphragm we ensured we had the respiratory capacity to project our voice.[1] Anxiety, fatigue, and poor habits all work against these foundational components of good lecturing, thus it’s worth checking in with our body and breath periodically.

Next, after vocal warm-ups, we worked on projecting our voice by imagining trying to hit a target in the back of the room. We practiced this by having everyone line up in two parallel rows across the room from each other. We then tried to project our voice across to our partner who attempted to pick it out among all of the other voices. I think the acoustics in the room made this particularly difficult, but I nevertheless liked the idea of “throwing” my voice to a partner like it was a ball. If anything, I thought this was a helpful conceptual cue I could use in a large lecture hall.

We then turned to practicing vocal articulation, running through a range of vowel and consonant exercises. This included practicing voiced and voiceless plosives (p-b, t-d, k-g), ultimately leading to a game of repeating “topeka-bodega” in a variety of iterations. We finished with a round of old-fashioned tongue twisters, involving both Sally’s seashells and Peter’s peppers, among few others.

After our voices were prepared we engaged in several voice modulation exercises. These were particularly insightful because they forced us to consider where we placed the tonal emphasis when we spoke. More specifically, it asked if we could make a question better by modifying our intonation patterns. By switching the emphasis from, “can *anyone* add something to that comment,” to “ can anyone *add* something to that comment,” it moves the focus from trying to find a willing speaker to the operative directive, namely generating news ideas through “addition.” A subtle change surely, but one I believe could have a cumulative subconscious impact on ourselves and our students. If we are always “begging” our students to speak through our intonations, it creates an expectation that they normally do not have to participate.

All of these elements came together when we added motion, both through gesticulation and walking around the classroom. Not only does motion add dynamism and excitement to what we say, it can add important paralinguistic (kinesic) cues which can modify, clarify, or nuance verbal meaning in important ways. Ultimately, by wisely employing vocal and physical animation we can disrupt patterns in our teaching performance and elicit a more engaging classroom setting. In addition, these actions need not be overly dramatic to be successful, as good posture, strong vocal projection, and a wisely placed pause or intonation can create the desired effect.

Notes:

[1] To notice the rhythms of our breathing, we placed one hand on our chest and another on our belly and tried to identify which moved more when we breathed. The positioning of the hands added a subtle physical cue to help draw our breath into our diaphragms.

My first few rodeos of teaching did not take the learning outcomes [LOs] in my syllabus too seriously.[1] They were window dressings. Today, they significantly shape the courses I create, indeed, they are the foundation. This is my conversion story.

Of course, those familiar with “backwards design” (from the Understanding by Design framework) know the entire process of designing a new class begins with drafting LOs. LOs are the skills, habits, and patterns of thinking that students will cultivate in your classroom. It is worth noting that LOs only have minimal overlap with content. In other words, these define what the students will do with the content. For folks who prefer to start designing their courses by curating appropriate readings, for example, this approach may seem, well, “backwards.” The name “backwards design” reflect this. It also represents the opposite direction from the perspective of the student in the course.

Thinking “backwards” allows us to focus on what matters, to not lose the forest for the trees. Our courses should – or at least can – change how students think or even act, not just what they know. When we just focus on our lecture material or the content of proposed readings, it is easy to forget these larger aspirations. We should not only be concerned with our students learning facts, but what they can do with those facts.[2]

Like many novice instructors, even when I had these grand aspirations the stress of putting together a new syllabus often pulled me back to the “basics” – the basics of deciding reading material and crafting lecture notes. As I was recently telling several new instructors, I did not appreciate the power of LOs because I was struggling day-to-day. I had long given up on the big picture. In my experience, even after the first time I designed a course starting from the LOs, I was unconvinced by their ultimate value.

After I built up some confidence teaching – specifically getting my “reps” in teaching freshman writing, an explicitly skill-based course – and learning I could survive day-to-day, I became dissatisfied with my assessments in my other courses. Uninspired quizzes, midterms, finals, and papers were the rigmarole. I soon started to think the problem was how I was conceiving of my courses’ role in the lives of my students. Did I just want them to memorize facts and become trivia masters? By continually focusing on texts I also funneled my assessment onto low-level tasks of comprehension and memorization.

Inspired to try and have my students train in higher-level orders of thinking, most specifically in analysis and evaluation, I first changed my daily reading assignments. Instead of having students summarize the main argument, I asked them about their opinions (gasp). Specifically I asked them which passages struck them as interesting and why, which passages were confusing and why, which passages were they critical of and why. In other words, I started to think “backwards.” My students were now directly practicing – sometimes imperfectly[3] – the skills I wanted them to develop. Class conversation immediately perked up. This was a small revelation. My thinking process then filtered up into the types of essay prompts I devised. Now, all of my assessments are derived from my LOs. My reading and lectures are – and I only mean this in a relative sense – irrelevant (shun me if you must).

In my retelling, the crux of my conversion story fall upon tyring to reconceive my assessment strategies. Now, when I think about readings, I also have to consider their capacity to help me reach the objectives I have set for my students. Sometimes, this forces me to “create” a lot more (like podcasts), but in return I also ask students to “create” a lot more – I consider this a win-win.

What Does a LO Look Like?

There are many many many introductions to crafting Learning Outcomes online, here are my crib notes:

Well written Learning Outcomes:

1. Tell the studentwhat they will do (not what the teacher will do).
2. Use “thinking” action verbs that help measure the level of learning (see Bloom’s taxonomy)
3. Refer to specific content (and/or clearly telescope to particular assessments, i.e. are measurable)
4. Are concise and clear

Generally, a LO will often take the form: Actor/student + Bloom’s taxonomy verb + topic/content/related activity/assignment.

Also, it is advisable to exercise these verbs and phrases from all LOs: learn, know, understand, appreciate, be aware of, and be familiar with. I’ll admit, these are often the terms we instructors think with when we causally reflect on our classes. But these actions cannot be measured in an activity, assignment, or exam.

Notes:

[1] I don’t want to get into too fine grained detail, but there is a distinction between “learning outcomes” and “learning objectives.” In my run down, objectives refer to the content of the course or goals of an activity (think: list X, discuss Y, state Z), while outcomes reflect what the student will do to achieve that objective (think: analyze, evaluate, create). The latter, being more directly student-oriented, are often included in course syllabuses. In practice, however, these terms are often interchangeable. Specific differences in objective and outcomes are discussed here.

[2] There are clear disciplinary differences here. From my many consultations with instructors and teaching assistants from across disciplines, skills are more at the forefront of STEM (think: how can I apply this formula to this problem). Unfortunately, folks in the humanities (students and instructors) too-often think memorization of content is the apex of learning.

[3] This point is often overlooked. For the most part, students have been trained to summarize – this is the easiest thing to test on standardized tests. Thinking with the text is a new skill, please do not think students will all be masters at this skill immediately, it needs to be modeled, practiced, failed, and retried.

The first time I ever taught a class I was given two days to plan a three hour lecture. I had just finished a master’s degree with a focus on Buddhist ethics, so I was tasked with translating my work into a serviceable lecture. I had barely participated in classroom discussions when I was a student, thus the idea of lecturing to a group of sixty students was utterly terrifying. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and my mind raced with all of the potential student questions I couldn’t answer.

When recently given the opportunity to offer a workshop for Instructional Development on managing teaching anxiety for new TAs and instructors, I jumped at the opportunity. Not only had I suffered from it greatly, but I also overcame it quite thoroughly. The first part of the workshop focused on reframing teaching anxiety before talking about specific strategies to overcome it.

As was my experience, teaching was not an inborn gift, but a skill that needed to be cultivated over time (see slide below). Part of my anxiety was performing a skill I knew I was not particularly good at –  indeed, a sense of competency, even mastery, comes with time and persistence.

I created a simple handout for my workshop that asked participants to freewrite about their anxieties and then rank them from most to least anxiety inducing. After this exercise (essentially asking folks to identify and name their anxieties), I started by addressing the most general strategies for combatting stress (see below), including the all-too-forgotten “Great Triad” of sleep, diet, and exercise. I was only recently introduced to the excellent research on sleep by Matthew Walker, and mentioned several ideas he recently discussed on a podcast. In addition to this, our university has great resources for both creating a nutrition profile and exercise options, thus I made sure everyone was familiar with them.

The first grouping of targeted teaching anxiety issues revolved around stage freight (see below). I had read that having people stare at you triggers part of our natural fear of predators and being eaten! In any regard, part of reducing stage freight is minimizing the unknown and creating a classroom “ritual.”

The second grouping of targeted teaching anxieties focused on imposter syndrome and the fear of “not knowing enough” (see below). In my experience, the most challenging – and most impactful – change was “stepping into” my ignorance (bullet point #3). I do not always have to play a gatekeeper of knowledge, but can side with my students as an explorer of the unknown. By letting my students know the breadth and complexity of a disciplinary field I can also introduce the wonder of doing research and the reality that many issues still need to be explored. Having a student ask a “tough” question does ntm have to be a monent of embarassment, but a moment to model how you would think through the problem and assess possible solutions.

The third grouping dealt with the fear of creating student interest in the class. To me, this can be alleviated once an instructor acquires a repertoire of teaching strategies that can be deployed when necessary in order to create an engaging classroom culture.

We finished by talking about strategies for dealing with potentially combative students and anxiety around time management and preparation.

*This is part of a series of posts reflecting on my experiences offering workshops on university pedagogy. Please contact me directly if you want full versions of my slides pmr01[at]ucsb[dot]edu.

Yesterday, I gave a short demonstration and workshop on how to perform in-class group activities. My path to embracing group activities has been…long. As an undergrad, I absolutely despised group work. This was partly due to my stubbornness and partly due, as I’ve come to understand, to poorly executed planning by my old (but dearly valued) instructors. My views on group work shifted significantly when I was trained to teach freshman composition and rhetoric at UCSB and thus I returned to my old seminar yesterday to offer my insights to this year’s new batch of writing instructors.

Slide 1

The class was comprised of about twenty graduate students who all had some previous teaching experience. To begin, I asked how many of them alreadly included group work as an intergral part of their classroom practices. Less than one-quarter of them raised their hands. This was not surprising, I’ve found many others have had similar negative experiecnes of group work as students as myself. I then turned to giving an outline of the potential benefits and drawbacks of group work [Slide 1]. Ultimately, I’ve come to feel that the negatives associated with group work can be significantly mitigated (except for the extra time it takes to do it) and the benefits can be amplified if the group activities are structured well.

Slide 2

I spent a significant amount of time discussing the elements of an effective group activity [Slide 2]. Group activities need to be started early and often in the term to establish them as a regular part of class meetings – they should not be treated as a special event nor added to a course halfway through the term when a classroom culture has already been established. Groups should always be kept relatively small so no one can “hide” or easily shy away from conversation. I’ve found that three members per group is fairly optimal (groups with too many people invite “social loafing”).

Ideally, activities should be oriented around open-ended questions that require creativity or discussion/argumentation among the memebers. The questions the students are addressing should be clear (written on a slide or board) and the time limits should be strict. I always prefer to keep the timing tight, giving students only 3-5 minutes to complete most tasks (the tasks are often not very complex). I feel this creates an energy and motivation to work quickly and effectively.  Importantly, the goups should always need to produce a “deliverable” – either shairing their ideas verbally with the class, handing in an assignment, or posting on our course website. To facilitate this, I will always ask that someone operates as a scribe to take notes for the group. When the activity allows for it, I will provide separate roles for each member, with the “skeptic” being the most interesting for some students. Their duty is to offer disagrements (ideally, counterarguments) whenever possible, to halt any chance of “group think.” Finally, I often allow a minute or two of off-task time before or after an activity to let the students get to know each other and build classroom camaraderie.

Slide 3

Since this short commtarial lecture was for a class of new writing instructors, I provided them with instructions of how a group activity built for them might look [Slide 3]. Note the question was simple and direct and I provided some examples to stimulate ideas. In addition, there was a clear expectation that the response needed to be written down and there was a clear (short) time limit.

I spent the rest of my class time talking about processes – namely, writing, researching, and reading – which I will return to in a later post.

*This is part of a series of posts reflecting on my experiences offering workshops on university pedagogy. Please contact me directly if you want full versions of my slides pmr01[at]ucsb[dot]edu.