I just read Mark Sample’s post at ProfHacker on the “unacknowledged and unappreciated influences upon your teaching.” Here is a taste:
I occasionally ask my students to write a literacy narrative, a kind of autobiographical account of their history with reading and writing. It’s an assignment that usually begins with the students shrugging their shoulders, as if they’d have little to say about their relationship with reading and composition.
But the assignment frequently evolves into a substantive rediscovery and reflection of forgotten moments in my students’ lives, as they excitedly remember long-unacknowledged or unappreciated influences upon their reading and writing habits.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a similar kind of narrative: the teaching narrative, in which professors contemplate the people and experiences that have influenced them as teachers. My guess is that we’d begin with several obvious sources of influence—say, a favorite professor we remember fondly from our own undergraduate days—but that as we delve deeper we’d uncover influences that we’ve never fully appreciated.
In my own case, I’ve been rediscovering the importance of a professor I had as an undergraduate secondary education major at a large state university in the nineties. In many ways it’s not strange that this professor—I’ll call him Doc—would have influenced me. He headed the social studies education program, where I took many classes, and he was my adviser. Yet he wasn’t my favorite professor by any means. And once I left high school teaching and went to grad school, his name would not have been the first I’d mention if asked who influenced me. Only slowly and upon reflection have I come to realize how many of the central tenets of my teaching philosophy were inspired by Doc.
Read the rest here.
OK, teachers and professors out there–who has influenced your teaching the style the most? And why?
I feel like I had an incredible opportunity to learn from some outstanding undergraduate professors at Hillsdale College. Mark Kalthoff, Tom Conner, David Stewart, John Willson (of the Front Porch Republic), and Ted V. McAllister (now at Pepperdine) all had incredibly different teaching styles, but they each left an impression. When I'm in the classroom, I find myself drawing on all of them at different times and occasionally “channeling” one or another. I’ve drawn on them in different ways for the tone, topic, content, methodology, and strategies that I use when teaching.
For graduate seminar performances, no one could beat John McGreevy at the University of Notre Dame. He was incomparably civil but asked the most pointed questions imaginable. (I credit this to his South Dakota upbringing).
Thus, when I think about effective undergraduate teaching, I think about what I saw modeled to me as a student.
Great comment, Jonathan. Thanks. The McGreevy graduate seminar sounds great.