Teaching Inquiry

Backward course design is a commonly used practice in which teachers begin course planning by determining their intended learning outcomes, and then they develop learning modules and assignments in correspondence with those outcomes. I like backward design, but I think it overlooks a crucial first step, which is to identify what pedagogical values are guiding us.

We all have underlying values that shape the learning environments we seek to cultivate. These values are embedded in the learning outcomes we want students to achieve as well as the language, tone, and content of our syllabus. They are embedded in the in-class activities we design and how we create a sense of community in the classroom. Finally, and perhaps most vitally, they are embedded in how we approach assessment.

When we make these values explicit—at least to ourselves and ideally to our students—we can better ensure that our teaching practices uphold the integrity of our values. This makes for more conscientious, effective, and rewarding teaching and learning.

Unlike principles, which I perceive as (more or less) stable ideals, values can (and probably should) evolve as teachers gain new experiences and insights. Identifying (or re-identifying) one’s values, then, should be the first step to any course design process.

This semester, I am teaching my department’s Pedagogy seminar, which prepares graduate students to teach their own sections of first-year writing. The values I identified as guiding my course design reflect a mixture of mindsets and practices I hope to implement, and that I hope students will see as beneficial to their learning:

• Appreciative Mindset. Emerging from practices of appreciative inquiry, this mindset encourages me to focus on what is already working in a learning environment, and how we can collectively build on that, and not obsessing (always tempting for the anxiety inclined) over what’s not working. Even when a learning environment is highly challenged, I try to imagine what it could or should look like.

• Generative Failure. This is the idea that experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from mistakes are fundamental to any learning process, and that the harder the concept or skill, the more mistakes one will make. Generative Failure is hard to cultivate in formal education, which instead stigmatizes failure in various ways. Teaching amid these conflicting values, I want students to experience the freedom to “fail” at something they really care about and still get an A.

• High Standards, High Support. Inspired by wise feedback, a practice educational psychologists advocate to build trust among underrepresented and marginalized students, this value involves making explicit that all students are capable of meeting the standards of the course and, in turn, scaffolding a pathway—guided by clear expectations and regular feedback—for them to do so.

• Listening Across Difference. Reflecting my interest in how minds change as well as my experiences as a restorative justice facilitator, Listening Across Difference asks us to consider how we might benefit from talking to people with (perhaps very) different perspectives, not because we will change their minds or vice versa, but because we might each better understand why we believe what we believe. Instead of direct persuasion, Listening Across Difference centralizes curiosity and (at least initially) nonjudgement, sharing stories of how people came to adopt their beliefs, and regular looping to ensure one understands what the other person is saying.

• Intellectual Humility. Self-awareness that our knowledge is limited and that the things we believe to be true could be (at least partially) wrong is directly tied to Listening Across Difference. As a pedagogical value, Intellectual Humility reminds me not to assume that the practices and tasks I assign students will have the impacts I’m hoping for, at least not in one semester, and possibly not at all.

• Community-Building. Feeling a sense of community is highly beneficial for students’ academic performance, their resilience, and the overall quality of their college experience. In my courses (which, in the writing-intensive courses I primarily teach, have 20-25 students), I try to ensure that every student interacts with every other student at least once through a combination of small- and full-group discussions and collaborative projects. Ideally, students would all learn each other’s names, and everyone would establish a few friendships that persist after the term. Actively centralizing community is even more crucial in this “anti-social” age.

• Student Agency. I am an advocate of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory, according to which people bring more creativity and persistence to learning when they are intrinsically motivated by the experience of doing the learning itself than when they are motivated by extrinsic rewards like grades. Motivation is enhanced when people feel autonomy over the work they do, when they feel themselves improving, and when they feel connected to other people. With these ideals in mind, I give students as much ownership as I can (but see the next value) over the projects they pursue in my classes, as well as who they work with on these projects.

• Openness. Though I value agency, there are significant institutional constraints on how extensively students can wield it; inevitably, I determine much of the work students do in my courses. Beyond this, many students perceive education as jumping through an endless series of arbitrary hoops. Feeling they have little choice, students jump through those hoops, but their sense that the work is haphazard and irrelevant to their career goals makes the learning experience disengaging and performative. So, I strive for Openness about why my courses are designed as they are and how assignments are meant to support learning. I hope that if students understand the reasoning behind my pedagogical decisions—i.e., that assignments aren’t arbitrary hoops to jump through—they might become more invested in the work.

In my Pedagogy seminar, this work to identify and share my pedagogical values had a meta-component as well, in that I also encouraged students to identify the values that will guide their own teaching approaches. Here is a basic rundown of how we went about this process:

During our first meeting, I led students through a modified process of appreciative inquiry in which they shared stories about times they felt especially excited and inspired as learners. The more details, the better: What was the learning environment; Who were the people involved; What was the activity or assignment they worked on … What made it such a rich experience?

After this exchange, I asked students to list commonalities across the stories. What practices, mindsets, and/or components of the learning environment showed up repeatedly?

I then asked students to sit with these common themes, to consider what pedagogical values they embody, and to determine which of these values they want to uphold as teachers. Each student then shared their list during the following week’s class. At the end of the semester, students will revisit their lists and see what might have changed based on the course themes and texts we worked through together.

Throughout the term, we have had engaging discussions about how to negotiate the various challenges of first-year writing: How to get students to read critically; How to cultivate participation in discussions; How to approach grading; How to support struggling students, etc. I have found myself repeatedly emphasizing that these questions lack singular answers, but that if teachers try to align their responses with their values, they will be more at ease with the decisions they make, and their students will likely benefit as well.

Identifying one’s values is not a panacea to the challenges of teaching and learning; teachers who undertake this process will likely find that some of the values they hold misalign with the (largely implicit) values of their institutions—like the values of Student Agency and Generative Failure described above. Teachers might find that their own values conflict to some degree, and then they must figure out how to navigate those tensions. But even if the values that guide me will never be fully realized, knowing what I am striving for makes a big difference.