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Shaking Things Up

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By James M. Lang

It's late October, memories of summer are receding, and you are now in your eighth or ninth week of teaching. You are on the downhill slope of the semester, which is the good news.

The bad news about this point in the semester comes when you walk into class one morning and realize that the tracks you laid down to guide you through the course have become deep ruts, and you don't have the time or energy to steer out of those grooves and lead the class somewhere new. You probably have shown all the pedagogical cards you have to the students by now, and they know all too well what to expect from a lecture or a discussion or a problem-solving session with you.

In fact, around this point in the semester, I always get the feeling, when I walk in and announce the plan for that day's session, that the students are raising an eyebrow at me, shifting in their chairs, and saying: "Is that all you got?"

Typically, what they have seen by that point is indeed all I've got. I know that most of us are swamped right now, grading papers and exams, advising students for the next semester, and getting papers ready for conferences over the winter break. Who has time -- in the crush of midsemester deadlines and obligations -- to reinvent yourself as a teacher, and wow the students with some dazzling bit of pedagogy?

If you take a few minutes, though, to find out what's happening in the classrooms of your colleagues, either those on your own campus or around the country, you might discover some easy opportunities to break out of the midsemester doldrums.

The simplest approach is to buttonhole your colleagues in the hallway every now and then. Ask them what they did in the classroom that week or the best thing they have done all semester -- questions that enable people to engage in that favorite of activities: talking about ourselves and our good ideas.

I found another way to gather some good ideas -- this column. The first few installments have generated a tremendous number of e-mail messages from readers who are excited to share their good ideas with the world, and so I will offer a couple of their suggestions here.

Daniel J. Cleary is an instructor of English at Lorain County Community College, just outside of Cleveland. He wrote to tell me about a process called "inkshedding," an excellent means of generating thinking and discussion in small-sized classes.

Inkshedding was first developed by writing teachers Russ Hunt and Jim Reither in the 1980s. You can find all kinds of information about it online. Of course, as with any popular teaching technique, many different practices now fall under the name of inkshedding, as instructors have personalized it and made it their own.

Dan's version of the technique begins by asking students to spend five minutes writing down their thoughts on the main discussion question for the day. That writing should be what composition teachers call "freewriting" -- i.e., the student writes whatever comes to mind, without anyone making judgments about it or corrections to it. Freewriting's function is to help generate thoughts and ideas, so it's an excellent starting place for discussions of any kind.

In Dan's session, the students finish their five minutes of freewriting and then pass their notebooks to another student. Everyone reads the notebook in front of them and then spends five minutes freewriting in response to the first student's thoughts. That process continues through several iterations, until -- after 20 or 25 minutes -- the students have engaged in an extended dialogue with each other, all on paper, and are ready to start talking about their ideas out loud.

As Dan points out, that technique "encourages everyone, even the shy students, to participate in the class 'discussion.'" Moreover, the written process helps to spark the verbal discussion: "I've never had a dead-end discussion after an exercise like this," Dan says. "In fact, students often laugh or jeer or cringe or applaud while reading and listening to the texts produced from inkshedding. That'll keep them interested and engaged!"

Inkshedding seems to me an ideal experiment for those of you who may be mired in small-sized classes where the discussion is lagging by this point in the semester, or in a classroom in which a few students have been dominating the conversation. The technique will ensure that everyone takes part, even if they do so only on paper, and you can assure everyone's participation in the oral conversation, simply by asking the shyer students to read aloud one of the statements in their notebook.

I think inkshedding would work in large classes as well, but I also heard from another faculty member this month with a different idea for mixing things up in a large traditional lecture course.

Ron Yaros, who teaches in the department of communication at the University of Utah, wrote to me about his strategy for delivering lectures when he has large amounts of content to convey. Ron developed the strategy as a result of his conviction that deep learning is hard to come by when students sit through a lecture presentation -- electronic or otherwise -- in which they are given an outline of the topics, and asked to fill in the blanks with the details of the lecture.

Rather than organize his PowerPoint presentation around the outline topics, Ron organizes his lecture around five or six questions -- big, conceptual questions that the separate parts of the lecture answer with the content he wants students to learn.

That structure, Ron believes, "does a better job retaining students' attention and encourages them to formulate (and write down) answers to my outline questions using their own words," rather than copying down topic phrases from the PowerPoint and filling in the blank spaces with notes.

Ron builds upon those questions in two other ways, though, that seem to me to really push the strategy into a more interactive kind of learning. First, he pauses once or twice a class, after he has posed a question, to let the students discuss what they think the answer might be. Then he provides his answer.

Second, at the end of each lecture, he gives students a quiz that asks them to respond in writing to one of the questions from the outline. The quiz, Ron explains, "offers another in-class opportunity for students to review and to clarify one of the main topics from my lecture, instead of just stuffing their notes away until the next major test."

His approach accomplishes many different pedagogical objectives, including some very practical ones that Ron ticked off for me: Because the students never know which question will appear on the quiz at the end of the hour, they take notes well enough to answer all of them; the quizzes improve lecture attendance; and their placement at the end of the class helps eliminate the backpack commotion that usually begins when students sense the end of the lecture.

First and foremost, though, his lecture strategy seems designed with student learning in mind. It marries the best practices of lecturing and more interactive forms of teaching in those classes in which you need to convey a lot of information or ideas.

Somewhere on your campus, someone is doing something just as innovative and interesting as the strategies that Ron and Dan wrote to me about. Finding that person could be a simple matter of visiting your campus teaching and learning center, or attending lectures or discussions sponsored by your institution on pedagogical issues, or starting conversations with your colleagues about teaching.

But if you're in the habit of smelling up the hallway by microwaving leftover fish sandwiches in the departmental office, and hence you're not on speaking terms with any of your colleagues, don't despair. There's hope for you, too, if you know the right places to look online and in your library.

I've been trying each month in this space to recommend at least one article, book, or Web site on teaching in higher education that I think is worth a look. This month I would recommend you find a copy of Barbara Gross Davis's Tools for Teaching, a comprehensive overview of just about everything you could or should do in the classroom.

You will find plenty of practical advice in the book, from tips on lecturing or promoting discussion in the classroom to advice on holding office hours and writing letters of recommendation, all grounded in a solid foundation of research on teaching and learning.

It's a bit of a doorstop, but you don't need to read it from cover to cover. You can navigate it like a Web site, using the detailed table of contents to get to whatever topic you need help with. The advice comes in small bits that are easy to digest and ready to use in and out of the classroom.

Carry it with you to the department office, and read a page or two every day as you're waiting next to the microwave -- a year's worth of fish sandwiches later, you'll still be unpopular, but you will be a much better teacher.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons From the First Year (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He writes about teaching in higher education and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com