Learning Together: Small Teaching

This semester, I'm part of a faculty reading group studying the book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James Lang.

Two of my colleagues--not in Education, mind you, but from Engineering and Mathematics--got the ball rolling, and invited anyone who was interested in talking about our teaching practices to sign up. No one was required to join, but about 25 members of our faculty have opted in. So many people signed up, we had to subdivide into two groups, because 25 people is more like a cocktail party than a discussion group.

This has me grinning ear-to-ear, because part of my current role is to serve as "Faculty Pedagogy Coach," which is a fancy way of saying I'm to try and get our faculty members to think about, talk about, experiment with, and continue to develop our teaching practices. And this book discussion group? This is just evidence that there are quite a few people on our faculty who are interested in working on this.

This post isn't really intended to be a book review, but I will just say this: I'm about 2/3 of the way through reading the book, and I think it's absolute GOLD for helping educators think about small tweaks that they can make to their teaching practices, and (hopefully) see some immediate benefits. The whole idea of "small teaching" (which Lang explains in the introduction) is a play on "small ball"--the idea in baseball of making base hits, rather than always swinging for the fences. Rather than making sweeping (overwhelming?) changes to every part of the way we teach a course, we can make small adjustments in our practices, kind of like going for a base hit. And the best part of the book is that Lang draws on the best current research on how we learn to make his arguments for why we should consider trying these techniques.

Each chapter gives suggestions for small tweaks I can make to help my students with recall, with making predictions, with studying, with making connections, etc. None of these are earth-shattering adjustments, and I'm finding that I already do quite a few of the things that Lang suggests, but it's been a good read to remind me of why I should be using these techniques in my teaching practice.

But there has been a real benefit for me in this study: connecting with colleagues from across our institution every other week for an hour of talk about our teaching! This afternoon I met up with my discussion group of about 12 people from many different departments (Chemistry, Worship Arts, Biology, Business, Criminal Justice, and more) and we had a sustained, substantial conversation about what we are working on in our teaching.

And that? That feels really great. Knowing that we are all at work on our craft, we can hear each others' stories, hear the way we are all striving to get better at what we do, hear the way we are caring for our students and helping to shape the kind of people they are becoming...it's a blessing for me!

In my work, I get to work with educators in many different contexts. I teach future teachers in our undergrad teacher preparation program. I mentor practicing teachers in our Masters program. I get to do professional development workshops in different schools and at different grade levels. I co-lead a seminar for faculty who are new to our institution. I collaborate with colleagues in many different departments as Faculty Pedagogy Coach. Lately, I have taken to sharing with these various groups my mantra for my own teaching practice:

I am always becoming, and never arriving.

I hope this is the case for all of us who are called to serve as educators. We can always improve. We never fully "get it" as teachers, though we definitely can get better. The improvements may become more incremental with experience, but that's what I love about the idea of Small Teaching: incremental changes are part of my process of "becoming."

And the opportunity to learn with my colleagues? To talk about our teaching in an iron-sharpening-iron sort of way? That's just about the best part of becoming, even if I never fully "arrive" as a teacher.