One of my “colleagues” got very angry with me one day (we taught courses that used to be shared by the same students). He said,
“Students in my class don’t work very hard to do their homework because they say they have a lot of work to do for their class. You convince them that what you are teaching is the most important thing!”
He continued to bluff for a while longer (this wasn’t the first time he’d bluffed me).
It was a fascinating exchange (I was able to make some comments). But I have never forgotten that experience because I have always believed that what I taught was the most important thing. Here are some questions that immediately come to mind that I think we all need to consider regarding our own teaching:
- Didn’t you think that what you taught was also the most important thing?
- Why would you teach if you didn’t think what you teach is important?
- Why would you go to school long enough (and become poor enough in the process) to get a PhD if you didn’t think your discipline was important?
I convinced my students (not all, but most) to go to extraordinary lengths. Even today, I see students still tell me that they use ideas they learned in my classes. Just this last weekend when I was at Costco, one of my former students was there and she told me this, and she was one of my students almost 20 years ago.
Here are ten tips you can implement so you, too, can get extraordinary effort from your students:
- Make your assignments relevant. Explain and reinforce their sense of the relevance of assignments. to let students know that you have thought about what you are asking them to do.
- Clearly explain what you want students to do. Don’t assume they understand or can “figure it out.” Help them understand.
- Provide topics, where appropriate. If you are unfamiliar with rubrics, check online and with your college’s teaching and learning center.
- Show that you care about the content you are teaching. Do it through your involvement, involvement, and commitment to what you do. Students sense whether or not you care, and it’s more than just your words.
- Go the extra mile yourself. Every day. Whether you’re in class or not.
- Ask students from previous semesters to provide written feedback for incoming students. You can even have the students of one semester write sealed letters for the students of the next semester about how to succeed in your class.
- Provide timely feedback to students. Whether they’re turning in weekly assignments or large projects, grade them and get them back to students quickly.
- Bring enthusiasm to the classroom about what you teach. Communicate passionately why you ask students to work as hard as you do.
- Recognize that sometimes you were wrong in what you had raised in the study plan.. This can easily happen the first time you teach a course. It takes you longer to teach something than you thought or you realize that the timeline expectations you had were too ambitious. Acknowledge it and adjust it for students. It’s better to admit it yourself than to have students begging or complaining.
- Ask students for examples to use in future courses. Many students work well from models and just knowing what is possible is encouraging and challenging for many students.
Students really want to do well. Ignite that desire in them and provoke excellence and extraordinary effort. It makes being a teacher incredibly rewarding.