The Craft of College Teaching

A Practical Guide

Robert DiYanni, Anton Borst

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691183800
  9780691183794
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691202006
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The essential how-to guide to successful college teaching and learning

The college classroom is a place where students have the opportunity to be transformed and inspired through learning—but teachers need to understand how students actually learn. Robert DiYanni and Anton Borst provide an accessible, hands-on guide to the craft of college teaching, giving instructors the practical tools they need to help students achieve not only academic success but also meaningful learning to last a lifetime.

The Craft of College Teaching explains what to teach—emphasizing concepts and their relationships, not just isolated facts—as well as how to teach using active learning strategies that engage students through problems, case studies and scenarios, and practice reinforced by constructive feedback. The book tells how to motivate students, run productive discussions, create engaging lectures, use technology effectively, and much more. Interludes between chapters illustrate common challenges, including what to do on the first and last days of class and how to deal with student embarrassment, manage group work, and mentor students effectively. There are also plenty of questions and activities at the end of each chapter.

Blending the latest research with practical techniques that really work, this easy-to-use guide draws on DiYanni and Borst's experience as professors, faculty consultants, and workshop leaders. Proven in the classroom and the workshop arena, The Craft of College Teaching is an essential resource for new instructors and seasoned pros alike.

Chapter One

Motivating Student Learning

Motivation is critical for all learning. Without a real need or desire to learn something, whether acquiring information or developing a skill, learning does not last—if it takes place at all. Motiveless learning is shallow learning and does not take root as enduring knowledge in our students’ minds.

As teachers, we assume that all students will be interested in what we have to teach. To us, the appeal and value of our subject may be self-evident, but this is not the case for every student we teach, especially those new to our field. There are ways, however, we can bolster our students’ motivation to learn and help them succeed in our classrooms and beyond.

What Motivates Learning?

Before we consider how to motivate students to learn, we need to ask ourselves what motivates our own learning. What motivates us to take on tasks and put forth effort, to set and pursue learning goals, to do the work and make the commitment to learn?

One answer, in part, is rewards—external rewards. Perhaps money—such as the attraction of a job that pays well—is a motivating force. Perhaps it is status and prestige, which also come with particular kinds of employment. Perhaps we are motivated by a desire to compete with others not only for money or prestige but for recognition, acknowledgment, fame. Such extrinsic rewards are undeniably powerful, but they are not all that motivates us. Extrinsic motivators might very well matter less to us, in fact, than internal, intrinsic forms of motivation.

We are motivated intrinsically when we do something for its own sake; intrinsic motivation is self-generated and self-sustained. We might be motivated to learn (and to practice) guitar, piano, or drums less to achieve fame and glory, less to impress others, than for our own sense of accomplishment, for our own satisfaction and enjoyment.

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation each have their place in learning. Extrinsic motivation may provide an initial incentive for learning, but research has shown that intrinsic motivation anchors learning more securely and sustains it longer. When difficulties emerge in the process of learning, extrinsic motivational factors are more easily swept aside than intrinsic ones. Providing external rewards as a way to motivate better performance has been shown to be ineffective (Kohn 2018). Student learning sinks in deeper and lasts longer when the motivation for learning comes from within (Lang 2016; Pink 2011).

Studies have shown that the primary motivator for people to continue working at a job is not, as we might expect, money. Instead, it is autonomy: having latitude to make decisions about our work, especially about how we do it. The freedom we generally seek in the workplace is a freedom within limits, a latitude within boundaries. We don’t expect that we’ll be able to do anything we want at work. Our superiors decide what needs to be done. However, we tend to accept more readily being told by superiors what we need to accomplish when we have some say in how we will accomplish those things. “Tell me what to do,” we might say, “but let me decide how to do it.”

Along with autonomy, another major motivating influence is mastery—the opportunity to get better at what we do—to improve, make progress, and develop our skills and talents. We are motivated to work hard and to work well when we can see ourselves getting better; making such progress motivates us.

Both autonomy and mastery are self-directed goals: they come from within, and are each their own reward. These intrinsic rewards can also be used to motivate students. It is important for us, then, to find ways to provide our students with occasions to exercise autonomy in their learning and to create opportunities for them to develop and recognize their mastery.

Autonomy and mastery contribute to the pleasures associated with learning, with having choices and experiencing improvement while learning. In the best of situations, our students, too, can learn for the pleasures learning brings, pleasures that derive from learning’s intrinsic rewards. We can create conditions for students to experience these pleasures and rewards by giving them latitude in their assignments and projects. Allowing them to choose their own topics for papers, presentations, experiments, and reports is one way to do this. Another is to provide regular coaching feedback that recognizes their progress in achieving the learning goals we set for them (or they set for themselves).

A third form of intrinsic motivation is having a meaning or purpose for what we do. Meaning is essential for intensifying and strengthening motivation. The young entrepreneurs described in Tony Wagner’s Creating Innovators (2012) cite this kind of motivation as personally fulfilling and as a driving force in their work. We seek work that we believe is important, work that makes a difference, work that matters to us. In addition, the kind of meaning that matters most may have some significant value beyond ourselves, such as doing something for others.

In reviewing research into motivation that induces people to work hard, Daniel Pink explores these three motivating factors—autonomy, mastery, and meaning—in his book Drive (2011). Pink finds that the expected motivators—money and fame, for example—are far less important to most people most of the time than autonomy, mastery, and meaning. These three motivational forces work together. Give us a project and turn us loose to figure out how to accomplish it our way, and we are ready to work. Allow us to grow and develop our skills and talents in the process, and we deepen our commitment to the work. Help us also to see the work’s value, purpose, and meaning for ourselves and how it can serve and help others, and we commit ourselves to it completely.

Wagner presents a set of three motivating factors analogous to Pink’s. Wagner wanted to understand what drives innovators, what motivates them to create new businesses and new products and to work extraordinarily hard at making those products and businesses successful. Like Pink, Wagner discovers that though money is important, it is not the dominant or motivating force. He learns from the innovators he interviewed that they are motivated by passion, play, and purpose.

These innovators love what they are doing. It matters to them as much as anything in their lives; hence they are passionate about it. Second, the young innovators see the challenges they confront in developing their businesses as opportunities, and they have fun engaging with those challenges. They see their work overall as play, and thus revel in exploring ideas and experimenting with different approaches to solving problems. And last, like the people Pink interviewed, Wagner’s innovators have a sense of purpose in what they are trying to do. It is work that, though it benefits them, also benefits others—an equal if not more important motivating factor for most of them.

Autonomy, mastery, meaning; passion, play, and purpose. How might we use these powerful forms of motivation in our teaching and for our students’ learning?

How can we make these motivators relevant as we design our courses and lessons, activities and projects, quizzes and exams? How can we help our students experience these intrinsic aspects of learning? These are essential questions for all teachers.

Though precisely how we choose to marshal intrinsic motivation will vary according to who we are teaching, what we are teaching, and at what level, a number of strategies can be applied across the board. From the research and from our own work with faculty and students, we have distilled eight approaches to motivating student learning:

• Demonstrating care
• Providing feedback
• Identifying purpose
• Emphasizing possibilities and progress
• Using emotion
• Employing active learning
• Arousing curiosity
• Embracing uncertainty and failure

Demonstrating Care

Students crave attention, and they appreciate it when we give them our full attention. One way to begin the process of demonstrating care is to learn their names as early as possible. Let them know that you care about them enough to know their names, first and last, and something more about them that they might care to reveal. Learning the names of students can be a challenge, especially in diverse classrooms where students’ names reflect a variety of cultures, ethnicities, and countries of origin. You can ask students to pronounce their names, and you can invite them to correct you when you mispronounce them. You can also respect their diversity by asking them not only how they prefer to be addressed—by a nickname, for example—but also giving them the opportunity, if they wish, to share which pronouns should be used to refer to them.

In laying out your course goals for them, let your students know that it’s not just learning that matters in the course, but their learning, the learning of each one of them individually. Make sure they understand that the goal is not just writing improvement, acquisition of lab skills, or exercise in critical thinking in general that you value, but their writing, their lab skills, their critical thinking—the writing, lab, and thinking skills of each student. Be clear that you will attend to and assist with the progress of each toward their individual learning objectives as well as to the learning goals for the class as a whole.

We can demonstrate this care and build this trust by showing our students that we want them to succeed for the same reasons they want to succeed. Some of these reasons will be extrinsic motivations—grades, for example, to help them gain admission to graduate school, or professional skills that will increase their likelihood of success in the workplace. These are reasonable and realistic motivations that will increase student effort. But we also want them to take their learning beyond successful completion of a course, beyond passing or even acing exams. We want their learning to last, to have an impact on their self-development and understanding of the world, to shape their sense of who they are.

We can also show our students that we want to see them making progress toward acquiring knowledge and mastering skills. We can do this by carefully scaffolding assignments and providing them with regular, targeted feedback. Sometimes such support will require nudging and encouragement on our part. Sometimes it will require that we be cheerleaders rather than critics of their work. And other times we will need to offer constructive criticism, letting them know just where they are falling short and what they can do to improve.

Our greatest aspiration as teachers is to see our students experiencing the intrinsic value of learning and its associated pleasures, an experience that leads to the most enduring, most deeply rooted learning (Lang 2016; Kohn 2018). And so we need to show our students that we care about this deeper learning for them, that we care about their intellectual development beyond their grades and beyond our courses. We need to persuade them through our pedagogical practices that the learning they experience in our classroom matters for the long haul and in the long run—that it matters for their lives and not just for their grades.

In doing this, we are demonstrating how our own work with them is meaningful for us. And if we (and they) are lucky, they will come to see their learning as purposeful and meaningful.

Providing Feedback

Students want to know how they are performing—what’s working and what’s not in their learning. They want to know where they stand—how they are doing with respect to their classmates and with respect to a standard against which they are being measured. Timely and specific feedback—both positive and critical—motivates students. Positive feedback encourages them; critical feedback, when clear and constructive, shows them what to improve and how.

Some types of positive feedback are more useful and effective than others. The research of Carol Dweck (2007) has shown that students work harder, learn better, persist through difficulties, and more, when they are not praised for how intelligent or gifted they are, but for how hard they work at their assignments and how persistent they are in meeting challenges. Analogously, Peter Johnston in Opening Minds (2012) suggests that we provide process-oriented feedback rather than person-oriented feedback. He advises praising the work rather than the student. Instead of saying, “You are good at this,” say, “You tried hard,” or “You found an interesting and useful solution.”

Johnston suggests that we praise students primarily for how they figure things out—for the strategies they use in approaching assignments. Praising strategies, even more than praising effort, benefits students because it provides them with specific ways of working that they can use again on another assignment or project (see chapter 11).

Identifying Purpose

The value of work is rooted in purpose, which often derives from interest. We can establish...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Motivating Student Learning
• Chapter 2. Course, Syllabus, and Lesson Design
• Chapter 3. Active Learning
• Chapter 4. Making Learning Last
• Chapter 5. Discussion-Based Teaching
• Chapter 6. Lecturing and PowerPoint
• Chapter 7. Teaching and Technology
• Chapter 8. Experiential Learning
• Chapter 9. Writing and Learning
• Chapter 10. Critical Thinking
• Chapter 11. Assessment and Grading
• Epilogue: Teaching as Creative Problem-Solving
• Appendix: A College Teaching Survival Kit
• References
• Index