A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk with Doug McKee and Edward O'Neil on episode #32 of their TeachBetter podcast.

The designated topic was teaching freshmen, but we discussed everything from Baskin Robbin's taster spoons, to retrieval practice, to memory palaces, to Evernote, to metacognition. In the episode notes, they also included a link to Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching‘s Teaching First Year Students guide, which is well worth a look.

As I have reflected more about our conversation and what I would want to tell people who are teaching first year (or, really any year) students, I see strong parallels with the principles illustrated in the book The Four Agreements () and teaching well.

The four agreements

Below are the agreements as articulated by don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements, along with a few thoughts about how each one relates to our teaching:

Be impeccable with your word

Stephen Covey defined trust as consisting of both character and competence ().

We can show students our character by providing meaningful and moral feedback. We can have kindness at the core of our teaching. Our exam grading practices can also exhibit fairness and integrity.

We can maintain our competence by having a robust personal knowledge management system and by building effective habits. Ultimately, we want to use the strength of our words to show respect for our students and to demonstrate our own commitment to lifelong learning.

Don't take anything personally

For a long time, this was the only agreement I could recall from the book, because I wrestled with it so often. And that was even before I became a college professor.

“Nothing others do is because of you” (). In the past, when I discovered that students had shown a lack of academic integrity, I thought it was a direct affront to me. Now, I have come to realize that I'm really not anywhere near as much of the center of my students' universes as I once had believed.

James Lang's Cheating Lessons () really helped me depersonalize plagiarism and academic cheating. On episode #19, he stated, “You’re the last thing on their mind. When a student is cheating… their cheating isn’t an assault on your and your values” ().

Don't make assumptions

As I shared in the Engaging Difficult Students episode, I have shown a great ability to completely misread students. It is so easy for us to ascribe intent in situations and establish fertile ground for power struggles, instead of for learning.

We can observe a student on his/her cell phone and immediately assume that they must be attending to something nowhere near as important as whatever it is that we are doing/saying. We forget that his sister may be in labor, her Mom may have had her car break down on the side of a busy freeway, or no one ever really attended to him well when he was younger, so he has nothing to emulate in social or learning contexts.

Mahan Khalsa () describes what he calls “yellow lights” in selling, but I see them as coming up regularly in my teaching and relationships with students. He says that yellow lights are “signals the client may buy something that won't give them the results they want or expect; that they may not buy at all; or that may not buy from us,” but those signals may be that a student is being disrespectful and not buying in to what you were hoping for in the learning environment are also a form of yellow lights.

Khalsa's three steps for responding to yellow lights also apply to a broader context:

1. Slow down – don't increase the potential for conflict by becoming aggressive. Instead, remind yourself that there's a lot you don't know here and maintain your composure.
2. State it – name whatever you is that you observe, without anger or defensiveness.
3. Hand the “yellow light” to the client – ask them how to handle the situation and let them turn the light red or green/

Always do your best

The hard part about always doing our best, is that our roles are so often in conflict with one another. Those of us who are teaching are also pursuing some next step in our educational journey. Some of us are parents. We may be struggling to balance research, teaching, and university service. We may be struggling with our health, or with the health of someone we love.

Or some of us may just consider ourselves bad female academics.

Teaching is incredibly hard. Yet, I imagine even harder still, when done without a care or concern about doing it well.

References

[reminder]Which of the four agreements resonates with you the most in your pursuit of teaching well?[/reminder]

My mind is still invigorated from my conversation about public sphere pedagogy with Thia Wolf on episode 101 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Something special happens when we have our students take their work public in some way.

Whether I reflect on this past semester's experiments with poster sessions in my Consumer Behavior classes, or when my sales students role played a complex sale with someone they hadn't met before, the excitement of what these learning opportunities present energizes me.

My students were so engaged with the idea that their work could take on a more significant role than an exchange solely with me through the grading process.

The most fertile ground for significant learning experiences takes place within multiple disciplines.

Our educational system seems to be starting to figure this out at the preschool level, but I rarely see examples like this in higher ed. Our son's preschool writes about their curriculum this way:

Learning in preschool is hands-on and integrated. A child’s time outside chasing insects in the garden, for instance incorporates all the ‘dispositions for learning’ as well as cognitive development: science (“What kind of bug is this?” “What do they eat?”); math (“Is it larger or smaller than the other one?” “How many did you find today?”); language (“Monarch Butterflies are orange and black.” “Let’s make up a poem about butterflies!”); social skills (“How can we all see?” “You can have a turn next.”); physical development (running after the butterfly, carefully stepping around plants, manipulating the butterfly net); and creative (painting a picture of the butterfly in its habitat. Dancing and moving like one.)

There is no “math time,” “science time,” or “language time.” Learning is everywhere and happening all the time supported by teachers skilled at looking for and creating moments of discovery and learning based on children’s needs and interests.

I wish there was more of a push to have this paradigm in higher ed.

When we think of our students as producers of knowledge, the vision of higher education is magnified.

I recently came across the theme of Vanderbilt's Course Design Institute and was trying to figure out if there was a way I could attend, even though the application deadline has passed (oh yeah – and I don't work there).

Their site explain the Students as Producers theme as follows:

“Students as Producers” is shorthand for an approach to teaching that helps students become not just consumers of information, but also producers of knowledge, engaging in meaningful, generative work in the courses they take.

[reminder] Were you inspired by something that Thia Wolf shared about public sphere pedagogy, or have you tried something similar in your teaching? [/reminder]