Teaching Reflection – Education is Discipleship

September 15, 2019April 16, 2020

Why Individual Student Conferences in Freshman Comp Work

I just completed my second week of individual conferences, all of which were structured around providing feedback on rough drafts of each class’s first major assignment. Here were my four takeaways.

Less is more. – It’s better to go over one paragraph with precision—praising its strengths and observing its weakness—than to make general comments about the entire paper. Coverage is a fool’s errand. Go for the synecdoche.
Ask questions. – I always ask the student if s/he has questions, but when they go well, these conferences provoke my own questions. I end up learning more about who the student is outside the classroom when I listen more than I talk.
Provide specific next steps. – Yes, each student had significant work to do in revision. I had made sure to highlight specific parts of the paper that needed work. However, I tried to give even more pointed advice about what each student should tackle next: a new introduction, a revised thesis, two new topic sentences, etc. This allowed each student to leave with clear marching orders.
Find something nice to say, and say it. – No paper is entirely unredeemable. A draft should be messy. Find something in the process that the student did well, and acknowledge it.

August 27, 2019

Teaching Reflection: Week 1

I’m continually amazed by how much truth is nestled in a short student’s prayer traditionally attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. Every semester I begin each of my classes with the prayer and have my students pick out one of the things the prayer asks for that would be particularly helpful for the course they are taking. It allows them to dwell on the prayers words for a bit longer and gives me a sense of what they think our course will be like. Last week, I was struck by two parts of the prayer and convicted by another.

August 17, 2019April 16, 2020

Why It’s Good to Feel the (Cognitive) Burn

It’s always good to feel the cognitive burn.

Today, I wanted to take reading notes as a model for my students. Not wanting to double up anything in the course, I decided to take first notes on a book I’m rereading, Augustine’s Confessions. The book has always given me problems. I’m fascinated by it, but there’s almost too much there to do anything but mark everything up: too much style, too many questions, too many scripture citations.

So I found myself in a very interesting situation this morning as I read Chapter 1. It wasn’t clicking for me. I felt confused. I felt lost. I knew that I would have to summarize the chapter when I was done, and it seemed like there were too many things that merited inclusion (or nothing that merited inclusion, I guess). But I knew I had to keep going.

And after 15 minutes or so, the reading began making more sense. I remembered passages I had forgotten about: the stuff about being a selfish baby, the criticism of The Aeneid, and his lamenting of how he used his rhetorical skills.

As the chapter ended, I didn’t have to wonder how to respond or make up my notes from scratch. I had three clear objectives: put the content in my own words, find two key quotations, then think about how the chapter connected to other things I had read or experienced. I could do that.

It was good to remember what it feels like to be confused, to know there was a simple task on the other side of my confusion that I could use to work towards understanding, and the awareness that this kind of response will be great for students to use on everything they read: from the Bible to their psychology textbook.

August 3, 2019

My Fear: Teaching Reflection

I have been meditating on Psalm 139 this week. Psalm 139 shows the poet astounded by the depth and accuracy of God’s knowledge of him. In moments of doubt, surrounded by wickedness, the speaker knows that God is there and know his righteousness.

Two things have stood out to me.

First, I must always remain cognizant of God’s knowledge first and my knowledge second. I am prone to start with my own quest and only after I’ve discovered something reach out to position it regarding God’s truth. This passage reminds me that my knowledge of myself and the world pales in comparison to God. It is an encouragement to rely on this truth and a provocation to pray for this knowledge to be revealed to me as I follow God.

Second, I realized that my obsession with my own knowledge is rooted in fear.

I am so invested in knowing—things, others, myself—that admitting when I’m wrong is hard.

But I am wrong. A lot.

I am fearful. I don’t want to admit that I’m wrong because it might compromise my authority. But there’s another fear I have, one I rarely admit to myself. I’m am at times afraid to declare the truth because of who I might offend.

I pray that this year God will give me the boldness to declare the truth even when I know it might offend and the humility to admit when I am wrong.

July 27, 2019

First Principles: Teaching Reflection

Every summer I tell myself to just let my courses be. I can keep the syllabus, I reason, but tweak the in-course execution of my overall plan.

It never works, however. As I pray and read and think about what my students struggled with during the previous year, I always end up changing something. This summer was no different: new assignments, new course schedule, and a new assessment approach.

The tension I felt acutely this week was that my focus was supposed to be on living out God’s commandments rather than simply learning about them or passively believing them. What did that look like for me as I put together my assignments and assessment percentages for the new semester?