Teaching Minds
You taught me about the important role of explicit social hierarchies in a learning environment. At Yale the hierarchy was very clear and everyone knew exactly where they stood. You pay your dues before you join the club and academia is chock full of clubs. You taught this by both example and explanation. Seeing a good clear example of a social hierarchy that works (such as the one we had in our lab at Yale) gave me one level
of understanding, but I had to see what happens when the hierarchy is not so obvious to truly appreciate the importance of the whole concept. Any longstanding community will have a social hierarchy, but it’s not always so obvious (especially when the community likes to pretend it doesn’t exist), and that makes it really hard on newcomers. I’ve seen some really stellar junior faculty get into difficult tenure decisions because no one was guiding them politically (or else they just blew it off). And more recently I’ve been running into more and more students with “entitlement issues” who just don’t seem to buy into any social hierarchies. There is a lot of social commentary on why this is happening and how the workplace needs to adjust to a whole generation of kids who always got trophies.
| believe that effective teaching makes. . .
students understand where they fit in the world in which they live
students understand how to get ahead in the world in which they live
students understand the roles of those around them
There is certainly a great deal more that one could say about effective teaching. Unfortunately, much has been written on effective teaching that is not particularly helpful. Mostly it is politically correct advice that is quite difficult to implement. Here are two lists that I found. The first is from Learning to Teach in Higher Education. 1
1: Interest and explanation 2: Concern and respect for students and student learning 3: Appropriate assessment and feedback
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