Harry Brighouse: Navigating the Need for Rigor and Engagement: How to Make Fruitful Class Discussions Happen: "Derek Bok... a passage that, ultimately, transformed my teaching:
Teaching by discussion can also seem forbidding because it makes instructors uncomfortably aware of their shortcomings. Lecturers can delude themselves that their courses are going well, but discussion leaders know when their teaching is failing to rouse the students’ interest by the indifferent quality of responses and the general torpor of the class. Trying to conduct a discussion with apathetic students is much like giving a bad dinner party...
...Reading it was like receiving a slap in the face from someone who had been sitting in my classroom, and knew me better than I know myself. Why do we lecture so much? All teachers experience a tension between the need for engagement and the need for rigor. Without rigor, the students won’t learn what we want them to; without engagement, they won’t learn anything at all. In the classroom, the best way to guarantee rigor is for the professor to do all the talking—this is how they delude themselves that the class is going well. Unfortunately, this is also the best way to ensure complete disengagement, leading to torpor when we do try to stimulate discussion. Students have to talk and write, because talking and writing are essential for practicing the discursive practices and thinking skills that we are trying to make them learn in the humanities. We can make them write (some) outside the classroom; but in my experience most students have to talk in the classroom if they are going to talk at all. Realizing that students need to discuss is helpful, but actually knowing how to make them discuss is another matter—it’s a skill that has to be learned. The challenge is not getting them to talk, but doing so without sacrificing too much rigor—how to ensure high-quality thinking and talking which engages the whole class....
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