Teaching What You Dont Know

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Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom. In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question? Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions. Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure. (20090801)

E-Book Content

Teaching What You ­Don’t Know ............................... .................................................... Teaching What You D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .o.n. . . . . . ’t Kn ow Therese Huston Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En­gland  2009 Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Harvard University Press was aware of a trademark claim, then the designations have been printed in initial cap­ital letters (for example, Gore-­Tex). Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Huston, Therese. Teaching what you don’t know / Therese Huston.    p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03580-5 (alk. paper) 1. College teaching.  2. Effective teaching. 3. Learning.  I. Title. LB2331.H875 2009 378.1′25—dc22    2009016140 Contents Introduction  1 1 2 Why It’s Better Than It Seems  27 3 Getting Ready  56 4 Teaching and Surviving  82 5 Thinking in Class  138 6 Teaching Students You ­Don’t Understand  166 7 Getting Better  207 8 Advice for Administrators  235 The Growing Challenge  9 Appendixes  265 Notes  273 Acknowledgments  303 Index  307 Introduction Z ach is a tenure-­track professor at a small liberal arts college. He exudes con­fid ­ ence. He is young and looks even youn­ger with his curly hair and hip wire-­rimmed glasses. Zach teaches chemistry and cares deeply about teaching it well, so he volunteered to teach a new course for freshmen to draw more students into the sciences. The challenge? The course is a stretch for him. It’s called “The Chemistry and Biology of Fat.” With an eye-­catching title, the class has quickly filled and has a waitlist of hopeful students. But Zach ­doesn’t know a whole semester’s worth of material about fat. His ex