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The First Rule of Thoughtful Learning

The first rule of thoughtful learning as I see it is that, short of abuse, pretty much any pedagical technique is sometimes appropriate. The...

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Training for Flexible Teaching

For about the last year, I've been working with a speech and voice coach and recently started taking an acting class she teaches at UCLA Extension. Halfway into the course, I am most struck not by any particular technique or exercise but by how many ways there are to do one thing.

Several weeks ago, we started learning short monologues. We then explored each in three different ways ("body NRGs" in the jargon of the method we are using). Sometimes, the teacher asks students performing the monologues to do them in a different way, saying, "What if your director asks for something completely different?" Many of these experiments produce results that are unexpected but make sense. Even the ones that don't often reveal something about a piece that wasn't apparent otherwise. The point is to explore many possibilities before settling on one and be able to respond creatively to whatever happens.

In math and science teaching, at least in higher education, we often seem to look for the One Best Way to teach a topic. But life interferes. Sometimes, you write out careful notes and a student asks an insightful question, which leads to a twenty-minute discussion. Sometimes, your planned ten-minute review becomes the whole lesson because that's what the students turn out to need. Sometimes, you approach a student to help them and find that they are too frustrated or upset to focus. Being a good teacher means being able to respond to these circumstances in the moment, reacting flexibly while still accomplishing what you need to accomplish. This means that teacher preparation at every level, from formal coursework to writing out your notes the night before a class, needs to focus on developing flexibility. The point of preparation is not to know exactly what you will do but to be able to respond to whatever comes up.

Since I'm not teaching this quarter, I'm trying to implement a flexibility-building type of preparation with the undergraduate learning assistants I supervise. Right now, I'm just trying to ask them for multiple possible problems and solutions that might come up as they help students. In the future, I may develop more methods, but training for flexibility looks like a good concept.

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