A Personal Philosophy on Teaching

by
S.Faux, Ph.D.

Preface: As Latter-day Saints we are often called upon to speak at the pulpit in Church. Many of us find the experience of preparing and delivering a twenty-minute "sermon" to be associated with great anxiety. It is hard to be a public speaker. Now, imagine being a university professor with the assignment of giving six to nine "fifty-minute" lectures (all on different topics) within one week's time. University professors are expected to pull off miracles. They do, and it is stressful.

The demands of university teaching are such that it is necessary to constantly reevaluate what one is doing in the classroom. The following essay may seem to be self-centered, but it was written as a self-reflection for improving my teaching.

To readers of "Mormon Insights" this essay may not directly teach you much about the gospel, but it may lend some background about the author of this "Sunday School" blog. Knowing me a little better will help readers to appropriately take my arguments with a grain of salt.

For what it is worth – here is my university teaching philosophy →

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Cognitive neuroscientists are supposed to be experts on the topic of “learning,” and I suppose it follows that they should be experts at teaching as well. The act of teaching humbles me far too often to deceive myself that I have mastered either learning or teaching.

Almost two decades of teaching at a university has taught me that in any given course, some portion of my students will be smarter than I am. Sure, I am more educated and more experienced than my students, but I have never presumed that I have a superior intelligence.

Respecting the basic intelligence of students applies even to struggling students. For example, some years back I caught a student cheating on an exam in one of my upper-division courses. The student had been struggling in the course all semester long. It was the last mid-term of the course, and I noticed the student peeking under the exam in a suspicious manner. I lifted the exam to determine what was underneath. I found the tiniest little crib notes imaginable, about 20 one-inch square sheets. Each small sheet had tiny laser printing (about a 3-point font). It practically took a magnifying glass to read the text. The crib notes were meticulously organized and contained some of the best summary information I had ever seen a student produce. It must have taken many hours of work to design and organize those crib notes. In a later meeting, I told the student that if the extraordinary intelligence that had produced the crib notes had been legitimately applied to studying for the exam, then a top grade would have resulted. This experience taught me to try to do a better job of finding each student’s talents and then directing those talents into academic success. You see, those illegal crib notes almost said more about the student’s intellectual abilities (even through ethically misdirected) than any exam might have measured when taken properly.

My university attracts wonderful students, and I have had good reason to be confident in their abilities. My students’ questions have often educated me. Consequently, I attempt to create a classroom atmosphere in which there is no such thing as a silly question. In fact, questions based in child-like curiosity are sometimes the very best. I will never forget my 9-year old boy’s question to me while we watched a spider crawl on its web outside of our home. He asked, “Why don’t spiders get stuck in their own webs?” It was a brilliant question that I had never before imagined. My college students sometimes come up to me after class and ask me some of the most insightful questions. Inevitably, I will answer, “What a delightful question! Why didn’t you raise that in class?” They often reply, “I was worried what others might think or that there might not be an answer. I didn’t want to put you on the spot.” Such occasions allow me to teach that good questions are often more important than “good” answers. We should NOT come to school to get “final answers” as much as we should come to learn how to ask the right questions. “Answers” are moving targets that typically become obsolete with time. The ability to ask an insightful question at the right time, it seems to me, is a far greater skill than that of being a passive receptacle of facts.

This leads to another philosophy of teaching. Science courses almost have two opposing goals: 1) “To teach students current information” versus 2) “To teach students to question and challenge that current information.” Science tries to teach facts, but it does not want students to accept those “facts” as dogma. In the past, my dilemma as a science teacher was: How can I teach foundational information and still get students to ask appropriate questions, to be skeptical, and to feel free to express contrary opinions? I wanted to teach specific scientific information and still provoke student analysis in the classroom. I had to allow controversial topics to be engaged. Students must learn to speak up. They must learn to overcome their fears of raising questions, of stating their opinions, and of objecting to ideas. Accordingly, I reorganized two of my upper-division courses several years ago to accommodate those issues.

Two of my primary upper division courses are on the topics of "cognitive neuroscience" and "sensation & perception." Years ago, when I first started teaching these courses, I used a fairly standard lecture format. There was nothing particularly wrong with the lectures, except that they made it too easy for students to become passive. I needed to find a tool to make them active learners. I stumbled upon a format that has worked for me. It allows for both lecture and student interaction. The inspiration probably came from talk-radio shows that often have an “open-line Friday.” On such days callers into the show are given extra latitude on the kinds of issues that they can raise with the host. I stole that format for my courses. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I set the agenda and have certain amounts of material that need to be covered. Fridays are a different ballgame. Fridays are a seminar day, intended to be more free-wheeling and uninhibited than the lecture-days. (Incidentally, I prepare harder for Fridays, than Mondays or Wednesdays).

On Fridays, students are assigned college-level readings that go outside of standard textbooks and that intentionally are controversial and provocative. For example, in the past couple of years in the “cognitive” course I have used Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker is a Harvard-based cognitive / evolutionary psychologist who argues that the foundations of human language are genetic, and who believes that the brain is a collection of innately coded modules that constrain cooperation, community, and civilization. On Fridays, I expect students to come to class prepared to argue. My standard of success for a Friday-seminar is when students do most of the talking. (I am not always successful). I have students write a “Pinker Diary” in which they record their personal reactions, chapter by chapter. I tell students not to summarize the book (for I have read it already); instead, I ask them to give reactions and opinions. “What do you like in the book and what do you hate? Why?” I did not choose the Pinker book because I necessarily agreed with it, but I chose it because the Pinker book provoked the right kinds of issues for class discussion. The “Pinker-diary” is the most successful assignment I have ever given.

For my “sensation & perception” class, I have been using V.S. Ramachandran’s book, Phantoms in the Brain, for the Friday seminar. One of my students was so intrigued by the book that she invited Ramachandran to our university to give a lecture sponsored by the Honors Program. It was a wonderful experience for my students to meet the author of the book they were currently reading and discussing.

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Two great intellects have influenced my teaching: Darwin and Skinner.

In all of my university courses I try to teach why the concept of evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) is central to the study of behavior and life science. Darwinian ideas been widely misunderstood by the public at-large, and I feel an obligation to teach students how to recognize those misconceptions. The topics that I teach revolve around not just “brain,” but the “evolved brain.” Of course, I cannot require students to believe in evolution, but it gives me satisfaction as a teacher to think they are educated in the ideas behind it. Also, I can be critical when appropriate. For example, sometimes theories of social evolution argue for the “status quo.” I would hope my students understand that such arguments are often fallacious.

No doubt, my teaching has been influenced by the writings of B. F. Skinner, who is another one of my intellectual heroes. Skinner believed that the best way to teach was to reward successive approximations to some designated target behavior. By contrast, he argued that punishment merely teaches the learner what not to do, while also producing a concomitant emotional response. He concluded that punishment is not as effective as reward in learning. From Skinner, I have tried to establish specific learning objectives. I have tried to be approachable as a professor. When students come to my office, I try to make it a positive experience. I keep an open door policy. When I grade papers, I try to praise good writing, even though I am obligated to identify the bad. My job as a college teacher is to help shape intellectual behavior. I cringe when I hear about professors who berate students. Students need to learn intellectual discipline, but you cannot berate them into it.

Unlike the prominent influences discussed above, the greatest influence on my teaching operates in the background. I am referring to my training in the gospel. The "gospel" does NOT teach me science, BUT it does teach me to be honest in my search for truth. It teaches me to have respect for ALL people, even those students who struggle the most. It teaches me to be sensitive to "teachable moments" outside of the classroom, and to render service to students in need. Because I teach at a non-LDS university, it is inappropriate for me to mix religion into the science content of my courses, but it ALWAYS has been necessary for me to mix religious morality into the content of my character. Contrary to the views of some, religion embedded within the scientist is NOT an intellectual defect.

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Of all my students, I love my first-year students the most. These are the students that need to be taught how to succeed in college. (Upper-division students rarely need such help). I love to teach first-year students how to read a college textbook, how to identify important information, and how to get the information to stick in memory. Importantly, they laugh at my jokes better than the upper-division students. Strangely, I even enjoy looking at the shocked faces of my first-year students when they get their first exam score. The reward is seeing dramatically improved scores on the second exam. The big changes seen in first-year students within a single semester make them a particularly fun population with which to work.

Fifty years from now, if my students still think of me, they will not recall my lectures or teaching activities. However, I do hope they remember my enthusiasm for the pursuit of learning and the intellect. If I have made that enthusiasm memorable and contagious, then I have succeeded as a teacher. There could be no greater teaching reward than that.

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Postscript: Thank you readers for indulging me in this exercise in self-reflection.

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Copyright 2009 S.Faux (Email: foxgoku54 [at] gmail [d0t] c0m; URL: http://mormoninsights.blogspot.com). Readers may distribute this post for noncommercial purposes provided such distributing is of the entire post, including author's copyright and contact information. All other rights reserved.




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