My colleague and I presented at the Lilly Conference (Anaheim, California) this past week. Our talk was on Rethinking Assessment for Agency and Relevance.

We also got to attend others' sessions and have the experience of learning from such tremendous educators from across the country. Unfortunately, California did not deliver much, in terms of the weather…

But, the Lilly Conference certainly delivered.

Five Forms of Becoming a Teacher

Stephen Brookfield gave a talk at the end of the second day of the conference, which he entitled Five Forms of Becoming a Teacher. You can download his text-heavy PowerPoint slides from the workshop materials of his website (under PowerPoint Presentations).

I say that they're text-heavy in the sense that you can probably capture at least some portion of his talk by reading the slides. He framed everything around the principle that no matter how long any of us has been doing this teaching thing, we are still in the process of becoming…

It's hard to wrap my mind around the idea that someone who has written as many books as he has about teaching and who is the definition of expert educator, would still consider himself still becoming…

It was edifying to hear him express this in such a deep, profound way. I've been at this for 13 years and still feel like one who is becoming in each of the areas he discussed.

The five domains that Steve identifies as his areas of becoming are: pedagogically, ontologically, politically, emotionally, and racially.

Racially Becoming

The six bullets that Steve included on the slide related to becoming racially are heavy. I've had a chance to speak with him twice for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, plus some conversations before and after those interviews. In particular, we've talked about how we carry our whiteness into diverse classrooms.

Moving beyond the ‘good white person' who is unproblematically an ‘ally' – Stephen Brookfield

I've felt this temptation many times in my teaching. When a student has said something racist in one of my classes, I've observed myself try to hurry the conversation along and try to protect the students of color from what just happened.

Like they don't experience things like that all the time. Like they couldn't speak their own truth, without me having to protect them from someone else's supremacy.

I'm becoming a teacher who thinks less like a ‘good white person' who protects and more like one who has the courage to trust that heated conversations have the potential to ignite changes in perspectives.

Willingness to sit with anger – Stephen Brookfield

Thankfully, I've become far more comfortable sitting with others' anger. However, that seems to sometimes only extend to solo conversations. It is difficult for me to facilitate a group of others who are not equipped to receive others' anger.

So often, conversations about privilege translate into the privileged thinking that because they didn't set out to take others down, that somehow it means that they never could.

I'm becoming a teacher who facilitates hard conversations and helps students be prepared to sit with each others' anger.

Normalizing racism to move past shame and guilt – Stephen Brookfield

I wondered how others in the room during Steve's presentation (especially those who have experienced racism) might feel about the wording of this bullet (here I go, trying to protect others, again…).

What I understood Steve to be referring to was the need to be able to name racism when it occurs and to be able to then do something more powerful with that named action than just leave it at shame and guilt.

If we can name the racist behavior, then we can move toward changing the actions in the future. I'm still wresting with this idea and am not sure where I land. I both want to normalize it and not normalize it, all in the same moment.

I watched as our country normalized the telling of a story about sexual assault from a person who would eventually become the president of the United States. I see too many ‘all lives matter' memes, without any sort of cultural sanctions taking place.

I'm becoming a teacher who discerns how to name racism, without leaving others solely with shame and guilt. I'm becoming a teacher who normalizes the naming of, at the very least, racial microaggressions, to help change minds and actions in the future.

Becoming

I plan on doing some more writing about Steve's other areas of becoming that he spoke about at The Lilly Conference this past weekend. In the meantime, if any of what I've written resonates and you want to explore the topic of racially becoming a bit more, here are some resources.

Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Episodes

• #142: The Danger of Silence with Clint Smith
• #123: Presumed Incompetent with Yolanda Niemann
• #079: Stereotype Threat with Robin Paige
• #102: Proactive Inclusivity with Carl Moore
• #124: Intercultural Learning with Maha Bali
• #119: Bridging the Culture Gap with Annemarie Perez
• #066: Making Challenging Subjects Fun with Ainissa Ramirez (first ten minutes or so of the episode is about those early influences that led her – as an African American girl – to first become interested in the field of science)

It's hard to write about becoming…. to admit that I'm nowhere done developing into the kind of teacher I yearn to be… Won't you join me in this hard conversation? In what ways are you becoming?

If you teach in higher ed, you have probably experienced it.

Despite your best efforts, your entire class seems to start experiencing a huge decline in motivation. What started out well, as you watched your students' curiosities be heightened, now feels like an attempt to lift something well beyond your capacity.

You're experiencing “the dip,” and it is a common occurrence.

You may very well not have done anything wrong, to cause this to happen. However, there are plenty of strategies you can use to bring the motivation back in a course.

1. Kevin Gannon provides resources about student motivation and learning
2. Doug McKee describes ways to engage a larger class
3. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation provides this handout with some active learning strategies to try
4. Maha Bali reminds us that we can embrace a pedagogy of imperfection in our teaching
5. Heather Yamada-Hosley prescribes some self-care through a yoga routine for people who work on their feet (the more centered we are, the more we have to offer our students)
6. Sarah Rose Cavanagh asserts that “We don't need to coddle. But we do need to care.“
7. James Lang gives us small changes we can make in our teaching during the last five minutes of class, or the first five minutes of class

I recommend putting together a playlist of energizing music to start each class with, not taking yourself (or your class) too seriously, and just being thankful that things are probably going better for you than they are for this guy.

How do you try to address issues of low motivation, midway through your semester/term? 

I just finished listening to a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Mike Caulfield on digital literacy that will air on Thursday, February 2.

Not to give too much away, but at the end of the conversation, we chat about the tooth fairy, and other childhood myths. I joke about how I have tended to stay away from controversial topics on the podcast, but that I couldn't resist sharing that my husband and I don't plan on telling our children that there is such a thing as the tooth fairy.

Since I have started down the path of breaking out of my “safe” topics pattern here on Teaching on Higher Ed, I thought I would share two myths about learning that are almost always cause for concern by people who have subscribed to them throughout their career as educators.

We all have one primary learning style that needs to be accommodated for in our learning

I bought into this myth for at least the first ten years of my corporate training career. Now, I'm confident that believing in this myth actually makes our teaching worse.

• All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes
• Letting Go of Learning Styles
• Stop propagating the learning styles myth
• One Reason the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth Persists
• The Myth of Learning Styles

One take-away from the research that debunks this myth is to have multiple approaches for helping learners comprehend what you're trying to teach, instead of gearing the students' experiences toward their preferred learning experience. Consider ways of making your teaching visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, using more than one approach at a time.

I once posted about the learning styles myth on my personal Facebook page, having no idea the topic is as controversial as it seems to be… Please refrain from thinking that showing this myth for what it is (unsubstantiated) does not mean that people don't have learning disabilities. That's an entirely different domain. Yes, dyslexia exists, for example… and there are ways in which we, as educators, should be accommodating for that disability.

If we have learners “practice by doing,” they will retain 75% of what they're “taught”

This learning pyramid has also been propagated across multiple educational contexts. It is meant to encourage us to move up as high as we can on the pyramid, lest we leave people only remembering 5% of what we said. This is not to say that there isn't ample research to illustrate the effectiveness of active learning pedagogical approaches, but doesn't the “tidiness” of these numbers make you a bit suspicious?

• Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid
• Why the ‘learning pyramid’ is wrong
• The diffusion of the learning pyramid myths in academia: an exploratory study
• Five common but inexcusable learning myths about how we learn

Active learning can help motivate students and help them retain more information. However, the process of learning (and teaching) is far more complex than a diagram like this could ever convey.

Your Turn

What teaching and learning myths have you observed that have persisted for too long now?