"Hot Moments" in the Classroom

Following up on an issue raised in a recent workshop that she co-facilitated, Claudia Calhoun (American Studies and Film Studies) addresses one of the challenges of teaching in a diverse classroom.

A recent Advanced Teaching Series workshop tackled issues of diversity in classrooms and course design. One issue that several participants brought up was the challenge of defusing “hot moments” in the classroom – those moments in a discussion where a student says something offensive, thoughtless, or unexpectedly controversial. These are difficult moments for teachers. When feelings are involved, it can become the responsibility of the teacher to protect all members of  the class – the ones who have hurt as well as the ones who have been hurt.

In our workshop, participants suggested ways in which “hot moments” can become “teachable moments.” Among the suggestions are two particularly worth highlighting, as they can be applied broadly:

1. Take a moment to deconstruct the statement. Ask the student, or the class, to talk about what assumptions that led to that conclusion. 
For example, in the context of a class on religion and society, a student says, "Well, we all know that Mormons are racists and homophobes." To address this issue without placing the student in a difficult situation, the teacher might say, “That’s a provocative statement -- let's turn it into a question.” She might then re-direct the conversation with questions like:

• Looking at contemporary society, what evidence would we gather to defend this position? What evidence would challenge it?
• Where would we look to better understand the forces that shape official church doctrines?
•  Are there any places where members of the church challenge these positions? Where would we look to find these?

 2. Use the literature of the field to stage a debate on the topic. 
For example, in the context of a course on women’s history, a student might say, “But there are some things that women are just better at then men; that’s just biological fact.” A teacher might respond by saying, “This is actually a longstanding debate within women’s history and gender studies.” And he could use the next class to extend the “teachable moment” by:

• Sending out or bringing in two short articles (or excerpts) representing both sides, and staging a debate in class.
•  Telling students that the first 20 minutes of the next class will be a conversation on this subject. Asking students to find an article or blog post that supports their position and be prepared to introduce its main points into the conversation.

During the our workshop, I was happy to see how participants’ suggestions for strategies dealing with hot moments also showed how, in facing these situations head-on, we can model the methods of investigation and inquiry that we seek to teach our students. 

Some of these strategies are also suggested in a document by the Bok Center for at Harvard, “Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom,” which is recommended for those who would like to read more.

Has anyone successfully defused a hot moment in a classroom? What did you learn? What do you think your students learned?

The future of the YTC

Back in November of 2012, we announced that the Graduate Teaching Center was morphing into the Yale Teaching Center, and that a 15-year-old program built on supporting teaching by graduate students and post-docs was expanding to serve faculty as well.  In fact, we’ve been serving this population on a limited basis for years, but our new mandate to expand presents an opportunity to invent new services and rethink some old ones.

One question that we’ve been discussing is how the creation of the Yale Teaching Center will allow us to expand or improve our graduate teaching program.  One doesn’t have to look very far to find answers to this question.  All of our peer institutions have graduate teaching programs that are part of larger teaching centers, and they benefit greatly from their centers’ involvement in broader questions of teaching and learning on campus.  With our new arrangement, we’ll be able to match their efforts and do even more.  Here are some examples:

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about Teaching:  Talking about teaching with peers and “near peers” has well established learning and mentoring benefits.  The GTC has long made great use of these relationships to help graduate students navigate the process of becoming teachers.  The YTC plans to build on this structure, adding sessions with junior and senior faculty and creating new conversations that cut vertically, in addition to horizontally, across the teaching landscape.  A mixed group of faculty and graduate students can discuss the relationship between lecture and discussion, or the way a course advances a student’s quantitative reasoning skills, or how a curriculum can promote the development of a broad interdisciplinary perspective, in a way that either of those groups working separately cannot.

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about the path to Assistant Professor:  With the creation of the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation, we’ve aimed to encourage graduate students to take a long view of their teaching experience and preparation -- thinking about time in the classroom and each workshop or consultation as laying the foundation for the academic job market and an eventual teaching career.  The YTC will be much better able to infuse this process with insights from junior faculty who have recently made the transition.  Which activities in graduate school boosted his or her confidence on the market?  What experiences made the first year as an assistant professor easier or more productive?

The Associates in Teaching Program:  This program, now in its fourth year, is a prime example of an innovation that bridges the faculty/graduate student experience to the enormous benefit of both.  We plan to pilot more programs like this–programs that reconfigure how we teach and, in doing so, open the door to new ways of thinking about our teaching, our scholarship, and our disciplines.  

In the weeks ahead, the Provost will convene a steering committee to help guide the Yale Teaching Center to focus its energy on issues that matter most to our classroom teachers.  We’ve been talking to the fellows in our office about the Yale Teaching Center, and we’ve also scheduled a meeting with the Graduate Student Association’s teaching subcommittee.  

How have you experienced teaching at Yale, and how might the Yale Teaching Center further enrich the experience of teachers and students alike?

Bill Rando
Kristi Rudenga
Risa Sodi

How to spend less time preparing better lectures

Erica De Bruin

Advice for new faculty suggests that, when lecturing on material that is familiar to you, you should spend two to three hours to prepare a one hour lecture. If you’ve given the lecture before, it should take you a half hour or less.

That time frame might seem undoable/possibly insane. The goal of this post is convince you otherwise.

In fact, I’m going to suggest that spending less time preparing can lead to better lectures. This is because excessive preparation can mire you in details that are not essential for students to learn. Research consistently shows that student retention is higher when less material is presented. Excessive preparation also encourages you to fill the entire lecture period with lecturing, which is not optimal for student learning.

So how can you prevent yourself from over preparing for a lecture? Here are some suggestions:

(1) Specify learning goals first

Identifying at the outset how you want your students to be different at the end of the lecture will help you focus your preparation. It will also prevent you from wasting time gathering supporting materials that you won’t end up using. A good guideline is to limit yourself to 2-3 learning goals for an hour-long lecture.

(2) Cover less content

The less content you intend to cover, the less time you will need to spend preparing it. It might be tempting to try to impress the audience with the breadth and depth of your knowledge about the topic, but there is only so much new information that students can process in a given lecture.^[1] So focus on conveying a few ideas well, rather than a lot of ideas poorly. Doing so will allow you to reiterate main points, provide examples, and connect the content to your students’ own experiences—all of which will aid student retention.

If you’re finding it hard to limit the scope of your lecture, consider assigning readings that will provide students will basic facts and background information about the topic, leaving you to focus on the problems, puzzles, and debates that make the subject interesting to you.

(3) Let students do some of the work

Don’t plan to lecture for the full period. Instead, plan mini discussion sections, group work, short debates, or other activities that allow students to engage with the material actively (more ideas here). Since students retain much more information in interactively taught lectures than in traditional ones, it will also improve student retention. (For example, one study found that after two weeks, we remember only 20% of what we hear out loud, but 70% of what we say ourselves.)

(4) Don’t reinvent the wheel

Even if you are preparing a lecture that you have never prepared before, chances are someone has prepared one on the same topic. If you are giving a guest lecture in an existing course, ask the primary instructor for his or her lecture notes and materials from previous years. If you are preparing lectures for a course that has been taught in your department before, ask your colleagues for their materials.

(5) Prepare an outline, rather than a script

Prepare an outline that includes your main points, evidence to support them, questions you want to ask, and activities that you will include, but don’t write out a full script—it’s simply too time consuming. Reading from a script also prevents you from maintaining eye contact with students and can make your delivery sound rehearsed. If you are nervous, consider writing a script for the introduction to your lecture to ensure you start off fluidly, then working from an outline for the rest of the talk.

(6) Embrace imperfection

This suggestion is for those of you who (like me) have perfectionist tendencies. You know who you are! In giving a lecture, it’s okay if you are less succinct than you would be if you wrote the whole thing out. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer to every question that a student asks. (In fact, admitting what you don’t know can improve your credibility as an instructor). In short, it’s okay if your lecture isn’t “perfect.” If you approach each lecture as learning experience and welcome feedback, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself and be able to continuously develop your skills as a lecturer.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas about how to prepare lectures efficiently, and convinced you that when it comes to lecture preparation, more time will not necessarily lead to better learning outcomes for your students.

Are there any other time saving tips that you have used when preparing a lecture? Please leave them in the comments below!

---

^[1] Russell et al. (1984) compared student retention following lectures in which 90% of the sentences conveyed new information to lectures in which 70% and 50% did. The authors found that students learned and retained the most information when the least amount was presented.