The Skillful Teacher

On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom

Stephen D. Brookfield

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119019862
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Energize your classrooms with these key techniques for college teaching

Students say the best teachers get them excited about learning, stretch their thinking, and keep them actively involved in class. But with increasingly diverse classrooms and constantly changing technology, each semester throws up new challenges for engaging students.

Discover how to keep your teaching, and your students, energized with The Skillful Teacher, a practical guide to effective techniques, approaches, and methods for today's college classrooms. Providing insights, reflections, and advice from his four decades of college teaching, Stephen Brookfield now adapts his successful methods to teaching online, working with diverse student populations, and making classrooms truly inclusive. As well as being completely revised, updated, and rewritten, this edition adds six brand new chapters on:

• Teaching critical thinking
• Using play and creativity in the classroom
• Teaching in teams
• Helping students take responsibility for learning
• Teaching about racism
• Exercising teacher power responsibly

Readers will delve into what learning feels like from a student's perspective, as well as absorb the wisdom of veteran college faculty with whom the author has worked. Themes from the bestselling previous editions remain, but are revisited and expanded with the perspective of an additional decade in the classroom. This authoritative guide is now even more comprehensive to better serve teachers looking to improve. Whether you are new to the classroom or are looking to rise to new challenges, The Skillful Teacher will provide answers, expand your repertoire of techniques, and invigorate your teaching and your classrooms.

Chapter 1
Experiencing Teaching

Passion, hope, doubt, fear, exhilaration, weariness, colleagueship, loneliness, glorious defeats, hollow victories, and, above all, the certainties of surprise and ambiguity; how on earth can a single word or phrase begin to capture the multilayered complexity of what it feels like to teach? Today’s college classrooms are more diverse than ever before, and the explosion of online learning and social media has thrown traditional conceptions of college teaching out of the window. The truth is teaching is a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction, and risk are endemic. Our lives as teachers often boil down to our best attempts to muddle through the complex contexts and configurations that our classrooms represent.

Muddling Through as the Honorable Response to Uncertainty

Muddling through a situation sounds like something you do before you’ve learned the truly professional response to it. It seems random, uncoordinated, and not a little amateurish. But muddling through should not be thought of as haphazard, nor as dishonorable. Muddling through is about all you can do when no clear guidelines exist to help you deal with unexpected contingencies. When a racially motivated fistfight broke out on my second day of community college teaching all I could do was to try and muddle through. No course I had taken had put me in a simulation or role-play where I had the chance to break up an imagined classroom fight, so I was clueless to know how to respond. Somehow (I don’t remember how) I managed to calm things down enough to finish the class. And for whatever reason, I had no more fights break out in class that year.

As we muddle through different teaching contexts we usually draw on insights and intuitions borne of experience. Sometimes these serve us well, but sometimes we quickly realize their limitations. For example, when something that worked wonderfully in class last semester only serves to provoke anger or confusion in students this time around, the highly situational nature of teaching is underscored. Administrators and politicians don’t like to hear that teaching is situational. They need to believe that standardized indicators of good teaching exist that can be proven to be reliable and valid across multiple contexts. I have spent my life in such systems and, while they may make the administrative task of assigning annual scores to a teacher’s performance easier, any correlation they have with an accurate assessment of what actually goes on in a classroom is often purely coincidental.

As you can see from the paragraph above, this is going to be an opinionated, some would say polemical, book. But the skepticism expressed above is not just my opinion. Studies of teachers’ lives (Preskill and Jacobvitz, 2000; Mattos, 2009) indicate how teachers muddle through their careers. They report their work to be highly emotional and bafflingly chaotic. Career counselors and popular films may portray teachers as transformative heroes skillfully navigating classroom dilemmas to empower previously skeptical students, but actual teacher narratives (Harbon and Moloney, 2013; Shadiow, 2013) emphasize much more how teaching is riddled with irresolvable dilemmas and complex uncertainties.

Some of these dilemmas, such as how to strike the right balance between being supportive to students and challenging them with tasks they resist, or how to create activities that simultaneously address all learning styles and racial traditions in a culturally and academically diverse classroom, exist in any contemporary institution. But many of these pedagogic dilemmas are compounded by the market-driven, organizational effectiveness paradigm that has taken hold in higher education.

As colleges find themselves under more and more pressure to attract students, create new programs, and move up the league tables of good and bad ratings, faculty find themselves working longer and harder than ever before. It is hard to imagine how you can make a difference in your students’ lives (something most of us probably want to do) when you’re teaching five to six courses a semester, have long advisee lists, and are required to serve on important committees and attend endless (and often apparently pointless) department or faculty meetings. Add to this the pressure to recruit students in the community, the expectation that you will bring in grant monies to help cover your salary, and the injunction that you publish and display other forms of professional engagement, and the problem researchers in higher education should study becomes not why college teachers quit but why they stay!

Sometimes, however, there’s a visceral joy in muddling through an unanticipated classroom situation. When the internet connection fails, your power point presentation dies, or your mind goes blank, when students viciously attack each other in a discussion or answer questions in ways that suggest they have completely misunderstood what you’ve been trying to demonstrate for the last 20 minutes, or when they ask you probing questions and you have no clue about the answers, you hang for a moment (sometimes for what seems like an uncomfortable eternity) above a precipice of uncertainty.

Of course this experience can be embarrassing or demoralizing, making you resolve then and there you were not cut out for teaching and should quit as soon as possible. But at other times an intuitive “gut” response comes to you and you find yourself doing something you’ve never dreamed of doing before and being astounded that it actually has positive effects!

An example of stumbling blindly into something approaching an appropriate response happened to me one day when I had prepared a series of dazzlingly provocative questions for discussion that I felt were bound to generate heated, rich, and informed conversation. I asked the first question and was met with blank stares and total silence. After counting off 15 seconds quietly in my head I then asked the follow-up question I had prepared. Again, silence. Now I started to panic and found myself answering the question I’d just asked. I stopped myself and raised the third question I’d prepared beforehand, the fail-safe one that I imagined I would be struggling to raise about 15 minutes before the end of the class after a vigorous and sustained conversation. Dreadful, shaming quiet met my question along with the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.

With no forethought I found myself saying something like this:

I know that speaking in discussions is a nerve-wracking thing and that your fear of making public fools of yourselves can inhibit you to the point of nonparticipation. I, myself, feel very nervous as a discussion participant and spend a lot of my time carefully rehearsing my contributions so as not to look foolish when I finally speak. So please don’t feel that you have to speak in order to gain my approval or to show me that you’re a diligent student. It’s quite acceptable to say nothing in the session, and there’ll be no presumption of failure on your part. I don’t equate silence with mental inertia or lack of commitment. Obviously, I hope you will want to say something and speak up, but I don’t want you to do this just for the sake of appearances. So let’s be comfortable with a prolonged period of silence that might, or might not, be broken. When anyone feels like saying something, just speak up. And if no-one does, then we’ll move on to something else.

To my astonishment this brief speech, born of total panic, seemed to unleash the conversational floodgates and a veritable torrent of student comment (well, it seemed like a torrent after the dry spigot of student silence) burst forth. After class that day a couple of students came up to me and told me that they never usually spoke in class discussions but that because I’d told them they didn’t need to talk they relaxed to the point where they felt emboldened enough to say something. Apparently, my taking the pressure of performance-anxiety off their shoulders so they did not feel they had to say something brilliant or profound to earn my approval had removed a barrier to their talking in class.

I wish I could say I thought this all out beforehand, that I knew in advance about the way in which performance anxiety constituted a barrier to student participation and had therefore worked out a shrewd pedagogic tactic to deal with this. That would be a lie. What I enjoyed seemed like pure dumb luck.

And yet to call it dumb luck is perhaps to underestimate the informed intuitive rumblings that lay behind this improvisation. My action was unpremeditated and instantaneous but that does not mean it was uninformed. On the contrary, there was a great deal of experience behind it, much of which concerned my own participation in discussion. As a college student I found discussions horribly intimidating and was highly conscious of the pressure to sound smart. I’m sure that an awareness of that pressure, and a realization that removing it would have helped me focus my energy on learning rather than performing the role of “smart and articulate student,” was operating at a preconscious level.

Teaching as White Water Rafting

One of my favorite metaphors is teaching as white water rafting. In both, periods of apparent calm are interspersed with sudden frenetic turbulence. Tranquility co-exists with excitement, reflection with action. If we are fortunate enough to negotiate crises successfully we feel a sense of self-confident exhilaration. If we capsize our self-confidence is shaken as we are awash in self-doubt. These are the days we vow to quit at the end of the semester. All teachers regularly capsize and all teachers worth their salt regularly ask themselves whether they have made the right career choice. Experiencing ego-deflating episodes of disappointment and demoralization is quite normal. Indeed, being aware that we regularly face inherently irresolvable dilemmas in our teaching, and that we hurt from these, is an important indicator that we are staying awake and remaining critically alert.

Teachers who say that no irresolvable dilemmas exist in their lives are, in my view, either exhibiting denial on a massive scale or getting through the school day on automatic pilot. Some teaching dilemmas are so intractable for the simple reason that they have no solution. The most we can hope for is to craft provisional responses that seem to make sense for the context in which we find ourselves and that lessen rather than exacerbate the tensions we inevitably feel.

I know I will never strike the right balance between being credible and authentic because no such perfect balance exists. I know I will never connect with everyone’s preferred learning style 100 percent of the time because the diversity of my students’ personalities, experiences, racial and cultural traditions, and perceptual filters (as well as my own personality, racial identity, learning style, cultural formation, and professional training) make that impossible. And I know too that I will never judge correctly exactly when I should intervene to help a struggling student and when I should leave her to find her own way through her learning challenge.

Whenever I’m on an interviewing committee deciding who will be appointed to a new teaching position, one of my questions to candidates is always to ask them which of the teaching dilemmas or problems they face they have never been able to solve. If a teacher tells me they have no such dilemmas or problems then mentally I move a long way toward striking them off my list of “possibles.” I don’t want to teach with someone who either refuses to acknowledge that such dilemmas exist or, knowing of their existence, chooses to ignore them.

It seems to me that classrooms can be thought of as arenas of confusion where teachers are struggling gladiators of ambiguity. Just when we think we have anticipated every eventuality, something unexpected happens that elicits new responses and causes us to question our assumptions of good practice. Yet admitting to feeling unsure, realizing that our actions sometimes contradict our words, or acknowledging that we are not in control of every event is anathema to many of us. In our heads a good teacher is like a skilled archer with a quiver full of powerful arrows. Whenever a problem arises we feel we should be able to reach into the quiver, choose the appropriate arrow, fit it to our bowstring, and fire it straight at the heart of the problem, thereby resolving it. Appearing confused, hesitant, or baffled may appear to us a sign of weakness. And admitting that we feel tired, unmotivated, or bored seems a betrayal of the humanitarian, charismatic zest we are supposed to exhibit.

When all these feelings arise, as they are bound to with alarming regularity, two responses are typically called forth. The first is to be weighed down with guilt at our apparent failure to embody the idealized characteristics of a properly humane, omniscient, perfectly balanced teacher. This response illustrates Britzman’s (2003) myth that “everything depends on the teacher.” This myth holds that if the class has gone well it’s because you have been particularly charismatic that day, adeptly diagnosing students’ learning styles and designing the day’s activities to respond to these. Conversely, if the class has bombed or gone awry you assume it must be down to your incompetence.

The second response to feeling clueless is quickly to retreat to a position in which you deny that anything untoward has happened, saying, in effect, that your performance has been exemplary but that your students, colleagues, or superiors are too narrow-minded or unsophisticated to see this fact clearly.

When things inevitably fall apart it seems to me that the most reasonable response is somewhere between these two extremes of self-flagellating guilt and self-delusional denial. In traversing terrains of ambiguity, chaos and contradiction are inevitable. The old military acronym SNAFU (“Situation Normal, All Fouled Up,” to put it politely) nicely approximates the practice of teaching. Recognizing this, however, usually comes only after a series of profoundly unsettling experiences.

For those of us trained to believe that college classrooms are rational sites of intellectual analysis, the shock of crossing the border between reason and chaos is intensely disorienting. It’s an experiential sauna bath, a plunge from the reassuring, enervating warmth of believing that classrooms are...