Teaching is a human activity, so let’s discuss it in human terms
Like most professors, I spent part of last summer in an online teaching workshop. As happens in workshops, people asked us to specify Learning Outcomes for our courses, lest we professors teach without plan or purpose. Though I had begun preparing fall’s Mathematical Methods for Physicists course long before the workshop, the organizers may claim A’s on their self-assessments if they wish, as I had the tightest integration of Learning Outcomes and graded Assessments of any class I’ve ever taught. Every piece built towards a greater whole, and by the end I was asking students to solve important equations via techniques that they will need in future classes.
Nonetheless, I feel not dutiful but discomfited when I think of my class in terms like “Integration of Learning Outcomes and Assessments” as opposed to “combining several mathematical ideas to solve wave equations.” Both are jargon, but the later is the language of a field that I love, while the former falls on my ears like a paperwork request. Yes, my favored jargon is still unfamiliar to my students (especially when the semester starts), but the same is true of education jargon. Common English, our language of instruction, is more useful than workshop jargon for helping students learn physics terminology. I can announce that we will start by reviewing key ideas that they’ve seen before, then develop a few more mathematical techniques, and finally combine these tools to solve important equations that they’ve previously seen only piecemeal. Such statements clearly convey the key goals of the class in a way that both novice and expert physicists would appreciate.
Given my benighted rejection of words like “Learning Outcomes” or “Assessment,” how did I build a coherent structure for my class? I started by perusing standard textbooks and asking “What is the most interesting idea that links these topics?” For me, it’s the notion that just as matter is made of atoms, solutions to equations can be built from simpler formulas. (Eigenfunction expansions, for the math-savvy.) And just as bonds between atoms form elegant geometrical structures, these equations also contain geometrical patterns in higher dimensions, akin to shapes aligned at right angles. From there, writing the syllabus was just a matter of determining which topics are most crucial for building up to these ideas and what a feasible pace would be.
Armed with a schedule, I asked myself what my students typically struggle with. Common themes are weaknesses with prerequisite material and failure to review and retain after studying a new topic. I thus devised three types of assignments: “Warm-up” assignments that refresh students on key ideas from previous courses and apply them to the assigned reading, standard problem sets (there’s no substitute for practicing on lots of hard problems),, and “follow-up” assignments, which require them to study solutions posted for the previous problem set and then go one step farther. Each warm-up signposts what they need in order to understand upcoming material, and each follow-up highlights an important idea to retain from the most recent material. Not surprisingly, many midterm problems resembled follow-up problems.
Within this structure, the questions that guided each assignment and lesson were simple ones: “Does this matter for the bigger picture?” and “Is it too easy, too hard, or just right?” I find these queries more useful than “Does this align with my learning objectives?” and “Where does this fall on Bloom’s taxonomy?” One framing invites thought about a subject that I have devoted my life to studying, the other has me searching under piles of paperwork.
Nothing in my approach requires immersion in admin-speak, or an in-depth study of educational psychology. I can defend my syllabus via common sense insights about the value of practice, review, and focus, and the need to emphasize our passions if we want to actually convey passion for a subject. For all the professionalization of teaching, it is among the most human of activities. People have learned from knowledgeable elders for as long as there have been people, and have mostly done so without the ritual words of a bureaucratic caste.
Describing teaching in an unnatural tongue filters all decisions through an imposed template, undercutting the notion that the curriculum is owned by the subject-matter experts on the faculty. Even worse, it reduces the joy of teaching, akin to describing a healthy meal as “vegetable fiber with dairy, plant-based protein, vegetable fats, and organic acids.” I would rather say “spinach salad with roasted peppers, goat cheese, toasted almonds, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.” Yes, a physician or nutritionist may well need to analyze my meal in technical terms, but I will eat more vegetables if I think of healthy food in tasteful terms.
Talking about ideas also enables dialogue with enthusiastic teachers throughout the university. Listing Learning Outcomes aligned with higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy will not enhance these discussions, especially if the listed Outcomes are vague enough to encompass the many ways that different professors might approach the same broad topic. On the other hand, if, say, a botany professor tells me that their upcoming class will discuss desert plants, and include fieldwork in locales that burned in recent wildfires, we can have a conversation. I can ask questions about their fascinating plans, and discuss the shared challenge of teaching classes in which some students are interested in “basic” science while others prefer applications. We can commiserate about difficulties in teaching laboratory science. Along the way, I might even learn something about another subject!
Further from my field, some humanities jargon is beyond me, but I nonetheless enjoy talking with humanists, and checklists rarely improve such conversations. I want to hear how people around the world have approached questions of purpose, justice, meaning, and morality in the face of mortality. Sometimes I even solicit reading recommendations, but always by requesting something that outsiders might understand, not by requesting a text that poses cognitive challenges on novice-appropriate tiers of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Though I have produced assessment paperwork, I would feel silly posing a question in those terms, and I cannot imagine that it would have sounded any better to me back in my student days.
I offer none of this in an anti-intellectual spirit. I do not eschew learning new teaching strategies or tools (in fact, I devote considerable effort to adopting current computational tools in my classes), and I enjoy conversations across disciplinary boundaries. What I insist on is discussing this essential human activity in common human language whenever possible, and in the language most appropriate to the subject when necessary. I do not tell my wife that I love her because of a cascade of neurological and hormonal processes that transpired early in our relationship; I just tell her that I love her because she’s wonderful. (Neuroscientists, of course, can and should continue to discuss hormones and neurons.) Likewise, I do not teach so that I can integrate assessments and learning objectives, but so that I can connect a sequence of elegant ideas and share them with other people.
Alex Small is a tenured professor of physics at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He hopes that upon completion of this reading task you will be able to perform action verbs at the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
