Art of Teaching

[kaysixteen]

Is anyone here familiar with the Teaching Company course 'The Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator', by Emory Univ. historian Dr. Patrick Allitt, or his companion book 'I'm the Teacher, You're the Student'?  Comments welcome...

[toothpaste]

Coming very late to this very quiet party!

I teach graduate students in teaching in part through Allit's book. It's very readable and confident. It also expresses a very different teaching style than many of them prefer. Students get a lot out of the discussions despite disagreeing with a lot of his methods.

[kaysixteen]

Thanks.  What are your grad students' objections to Allitt's views?

[Zeus Bird]

I read Allitt's book years ago, and have heard him lecture in person.  Nowadays any non-tenured professor who used a title like that in a book, article, or presentation would be courting career suicide.  Allitt's book is a very capable presentation from an accomplished professor who assumes (as many of us did when we started this career) that academic credentials confer intellectual authority in the classroom.  Despite Allitt's concern for his students and his demonstrated willingness to revise his approach in response to student feedback (in his book see his confession of his weakness in economic history in response to a student's comment), administrations these days don't take too kindly to professors who baldly state their expertise in the classroom. 

[kaysixteen]

You are right, in the sense that when I read the book, in 2020, an overarching thought in my mind was 'tenure is a wonderful thing'.   A thing I ain't never gonna get, like it or not.  Grad students and adjuncts, even also those non-tenured tt faculty to a lesser extent, could likely not get away with some of Allitt's actions in 2023 American academic realities, even though that does not necessarily make his notions wrong.  I have occasionally emailed him and he has graciously allowed me to discuss his art of teaching views, which I will be doing soon.  I have some issues with some of the things he has said, mostly because he has, to the best of my knowledge, really never been an adjunct prof, and has been safely ensconced in his endowed chair for many years, and his British, Oxford educated background makes some of his views deeply divergent from modern American praxis in a number of areas (he does say in the lecture set that some of the things he experienced as an Oxford undergrad (class of 1976) Oxford itself has done away with, and we never had more or less anywhere on this side of the pond).  I am very interested in his responses, esp since he is indeed, as the Teaching Co advertises him as being, a 'master teacher', and his scholarship is also of the highest rank.

[Caracal]

I read Allitt's book years ago, and have heard him lecture in person.  Nowadays any non-tenured professor who used a title like that in a book, article, or presentation would be courting career suicide.  Allitt's book is a very capable presentation from an accomplished professor who assumes (as many of us did when we started this career) that academic credentials confer intellectual authority in the classroom.  Despite Allitt's concern for his students and his demonstrated willingness to revise his approach in response to student feedback (in his book see his confession of his weakness in economic history in response to a student's comment), administrations these days don't take too kindly to professors who baldly state their expertise in the classroom.

I'm not sure exactly what asserting expertise means in this context. I've never had problems with students accepting my expertise. If anything, I worry that they accept my expertise too much and that can get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish.

In my discipline, intro classes involve dipping our toes into all kinds of things, and the result is that some of my students know more than me about all kinds of stuff, from firearms to local geography to farming to weird victorian devices to avoid accidental live burial. I'm always really excited when students want to tell me about something.

I also don't really think that asserting authority over things like grades or policies is outmoded. I guess I don't say to students "well that's the rule, because I'm the professor." I listen to students and then explain if I'm not going to change a grade or make an exception, but one of the things I've learned how to do is to not make it into an argument. Authority isn't always about saying no either. It often is about making exceptions, allowing extensions, or admitting minor mistakes and adjusting accordingly. When I screw things up, I can fix them, because I'm in charge.

[jerseyjay]

I must admit I find this discussion confusing. There is no actual engagement with or explanation of Allitt's teaching methods. Instead the implication is that he is old fashioned who asserts that his position gives him authority.

For example, Zeus Bird states that "Nowadays any non-tenured professor who used a title like that ["I am the teacher, you are the student"] in a book, article, or presentation would be courting career suicide. While I wouldn't use this as the title for my teaching statement if I were applying for a job, I think that Allitt's overarching teaching philosophy is not outside a standard deviation of most professors. This is what Allitt said about the title in an interview in the (conservative) National Review (see: https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/10/im-teacher-youre-student-christine-rosen/)

The title refers to my belief that the teacher should take control in the classroom. The students come there not to be my friend but to learn history. I know it; they don't, so it's my responsibility to create conditions in which they can learn it. It is not a democratic or egalitarian situation. If they query my rules and regulations I sometimes say: "Ah well, I'm the teacher, you're the student, so you must put up with it." I've found that students are well-behaved and work hard if you make it clear to them right from the beginning that you have high expectations and high standards. They're very eager (at least here at Emory) to get good grades, and will strive to meet my expectations so long as I'm not unreasonable.

I think that this is the attitude that most professors take, albeit in different combinations. I think there are three important modifiers in his response; first "at least here at Emory" and, second, "I sometimes say," and, third, "as long as I'm not unreasonable." Teaching, at most universities, is not a democracy, because at the end of the day, the professor presents the material and assigns grades, but nor is it an absolute dictatorship, because there is always some negotiation.

I took a look at Allitt's RMP comments at Emory. They are pretty much what one would expect for a history professor: he assigns a lot of reading (70 pages a week! 3 hours of reading!) and he is sometimes a hard grader (I only got an A-!) who is knowledgeable. Sometimes his feedback is not clear, and sometimes it is super helpful. He doesn't post PowerPoints slides (neither do I) and he assigns ID questions (which I do not). Other than that his comments seem pretty much like mine, and most other professors.

His book looks interesting enough that I have ordered a copy. I do think that his premise is interesting--academic historians writes lots of books, but never really about how we teach.

[Zeus Bird]

I must admit I find this discussion confusing. There is no actual engagement with or explanation of Allitt's teaching methods. Instead the implication is that he is old fashioned who asserts that his position gives him authority.

For example, Zeus Bird states that "Nowadays any non-tenured professor who used a title like that ["I am the teacher, you are the student"] in a book, article, or presentation would be courting career suicide. While I wouldn't use this as the title for my teaching statement if I were applying for a job, I think that Allitt's overarching teaching philosophy is not outside a standard deviation of most professors. This is what Allitt said about the title in an interview in the (conservative) National Review (see: https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/10/im-teacher-youre-student-christine-rosen/)

The title refers to my belief that the teacher should take control in the classroom. The students come there not to be my friend but to learn history. I know it; they don't, so it's my responsibility to create conditions in which they can learn it. It is not a democratic or egalitarian situation. If they query my rules and regulations I sometimes say: "Ah well, I'm the teacher, you're the student, so you must put up with it." I've found that students are well-behaved and work hard if you make it clear to them right from the beginning that you have high expectations and high standards. They're very eager (at least here at Emory) to get good grades, and will strive to meet my expectations so long as I'm not unreasonable.

I think that this is the attitude that most professors take, albeit in different combinations. I think there are three important modifiers in his response; first "at least here at Emory" and, second, "I sometimes say," and, third, "as long as I'm not unreasonable." Teaching, at most universities, is not a democracy, because at the end of the day, the professor presents the material and assigns grades, but nor is it an absolute dictatorship, because there is always some negotiation.

Nearly 20 years have passed since Allitt's NR interview, and in the interim the adjunctification of the academy has robustly continued.  COVID only accelerated long-standing trends towards grade inflation and Ed.D.-influenced pedagogies that urge us to be "guides on the side" rather than "sages on the stage."  Ungrading and Universal Learning Design have paved the way for justifications to offer a priori flexible accommodations to all students over and above whatever students have worked out with their campus ODS offices.  I don't doubt that programs with solid connections between undergraduate education and professional licensure/certfication have been more resistant to these changes, as have highly selective universities like Emory, but one only needs to peruse any number of Chronicle of Higher Ed op-eds over the last decade to see that these pedagogical developments have taken deep root in higher ed, especially for those of us teaching gen-ed courses at schools with minimally-selective or non-selective admissions.  Higher ed has moved away from Allitt.  Some will take that as a personal criticism of him.  I take it instead as an indictment of these developments.

One note: the fact that many professors may agree with Allitt but wouldn't say so publicly before admins and students in the manner he does indicates how much has changed since the book was published.