Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky)
This is a scholarly personal narrative (SPN) which provides an eloquent and, at times, vulnerable account of how an individual philosophy professor worked to improve their teaching practice over time.
I was accustomed to talking a lot in my large lecture classes (with eighty-plus students), knowing that the students (mainly juniors and seniors) could punctuate my lecture by answering my questions, and to presenting material in my smaller classes for philosophy majors, knowing that those students would regularly interrupt with queries. I was used to good student evaluations of my teaching because, well, I am moderately well-organized, I key my talk to the material they should have read, I'm reasonably friendly, and they like my accent. But the passage [from a book by Derek Bok] hit home because I recognized my own talk as a way of evading responsibility of ensuring they were fully engaged, and it crystallized that the more I talk, the less I know what is going on in the students' heads. I wondered hether my high student evaluations might reflect the soft bigotry of low expectations.