TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AND GOALS
Judy Lightfoot
My basic beliefs
What my students should be able to do
What my classes should be like
My beliefs: 30 years of teaching at secondary and college levels
has convinced me to shape my practice according to four basic convictions:
- The central, critical purpose of classroom teaching in academic
subjects is to help students develop their minds. No social institution
except schools is set up to do this work systematically and continuously.
- So everything teachers do – choosing texts, designing assignments,
inventing activities, assigning papers, building relationships with students
and parents, assessing academic achievement – should be done in ways that
explicitly move students toward this goal.
- Every response from students expresses a kind of intelligence.
With the possible exception of stubborn malice, which is extremely rare among
my students, anything they say or do in a class has potential for classroom
use. For example, grammatical "errors" a student makes in his native tongue
are, though unconventional, usually logical. Even combative or disruptive
students are trying to say something about what they need to develop themselves.
- So the teacher's job is to acknowledge and use as part of the learning
process the intelligence behind what students say and do. One way is to name
the intelligent move and offer cognitive frameworks or patterns by which
the move can be refined and used for learning (see, for example, Spectrums
of Abstraction). In
doing so, the teacher is not trying to make students "feel good" but to help
them grow intellectually and to awaken their desire to learn.
- For example, when a paper is poor a teacher might talk with the author
about what stage the writing is in rather than grade the paper as if it were
a finished product. For most of the students I work with, a poor paper is
actually just unfinished. If the teacher considers the paper as a work-in-progress
at a certain stage of the
writing and thinking process, the student will understand how to improve
the paper and keep learning. The student's deepened understanding, particularly
if achieved through personal contact, renews his or her energy for the task.
- Teachers should be designers of intellectual experiences in the
subject, through which students construct their knowledge. Teachers design
the intellectual experience by selecting and timing texts and assignments
that will speak to each other, by setting meaningful problems to solve, and
by offering useful questions and observations in patterns each student can
learn to use independently.
- Once students become engaged in the experience, the teacher's role
shifts to being an observer of student moves, choosing particular
teaching moments to intervene -- sometimes as interpreter, to give
a class language for what they're doing; sometimes as coach, to help
students revise their moves; sometimes as model learner, instructing
herself in response to student moves and course material; and sometimes as
assessor of students' (and her own) progress and achievement.
- A teacher can challenge students in an atmosphere of high expectation
only if she has personal relationships with them. Like all of a teacher's
work, this part takes time, but it's an easy part because every student appreciates
interested, attentive support from adults, especially in a culture where
they don't get much of this kind of contact. So the teacher schedules conversations
with each student about his work and the work of the class, in conferences
and other one-on-one encounters. Some students need little contact to retain
the feeling of a relationship with their teacher; some need a lot. It's the
teacher's job to make sure it happens for every student.
What my students should become able to do:
- They should be able to respond to American and world literatures,
and to the English language, with appreciation, effective thinking and rhetorical
power.
- Their appreciation should take a variety of forms: personal
reflection, literary imitation and creative writing, performance, opinion
and argument, explication and interpretation, and historical analysis. Ideally,
each student will be able to play the whole range.
- Their thinking should be as bold, thorough, logical, focused,
accurate, clear, and coherent as possible.
- Rhetorically, they should be able to revise communications
effectively in light of their own purposes, their audience's expectations,
the demands of their subject, and the conventions of the genre chosen.
- They should be able to teach their peers about language and literature
with civility and respect.
What my classes should be like:
- Every good class is developmental. So every day my students
are required to express their present understanding of a subject,
meetchallenges to that understanding, and move by means
of engaging with those challenges toward deep understanding. Views
offered in discussion and in papers are temporary vantage points in a continuing
conversation about literature and language.
- In a good class, discussion is done by the students. Once students
have practiced the fundamentals of good discussion, each session should require
only a few guiding questions or clarifying comments from me. First
Thoughts to Better Thinking serves as a generic intellectual
scaffolding for class discussions, helps form habits that are useful in any
intellectual endeavor, orients students while challenging them, and reminds
them that their most important job is to improve their own and each other's
thinking about the topic.
- In a good class, performances and papers are rooted in the students'
interest in language, reading, thinking, and each other. So I try to create
an atmosphere of freshness, enthusiasm, and active engagement throughout my
courses.
*Note: The most recent influences on the content and aims
of my work are the U.W.'s unique Interdisciplinary
Writing Program and Harvard's Project
Zero, Cognitive Skills Group. Important early influences are William James'
Talks To
Teachers, Lawrence Kohlberg's and Rochelle Mayer's "Development as
the Aim of Education" (Harvard Ed Rev 1972), and Don Finkel's and
Steve Monk's The Design of Intellectual Experience. The work of Ann
Berthoff, James Moffett, Joseph Williams, Martha Kolln, Susan Horton, David
Bartholomae, and Janet Emig continues to shape my thinking about instruction
and students' minds. Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations is
brilliant about the intelligence behind students' mistakes.