Maintaining the Jazz in Teaching

from Keeping it Fresh - Maintaining the Jazz in Teaching: A Panel Discussion with Stanford Faculty

Estelle Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History

How do you find renewal? "I got a curriculum grant to internationalize the course. Graduate students working with me, feeding me articles to read from around the world for every subject I did. It changed my teaching, it changed my scholarship.

Pedagogy: In some classes, I say one change a year only. There was the year I learned PowerPoint. This is the year I am doing iTunes. I am bringing music into my lectures. It kept me fresh, listening to music and trying to relate it to themes of my class . . . . Or this could be the year I am breaking open lecture into discussion at least one day a week.

Lying fallow: You taught [a course] enough times, give it a sabbatical, teach it every other year. . . . After the end of a lecture class, I have a file I open called 'thoughts.' I just debrief from the quarter, a stream of consciousness, the good, the bad, the ugly, and I read these thoughts when I start planning the next time."

How has the experience with your students changed your teaching? "I take course evaluations very seriously. I pore over them. . . . I hand out my own [questionnaire] and have students check off on the readings. I ask specific questions to help me rethink the class next time. . . . On the last day of class, I do 'the-most-important-thing-I-learned exercise.' I tell them: 'No name on the papers. This is not an assignment that is graded. Take time to write a paragraph on each question.' I read those not just when the class is over, but before I teach it the next time."

What resources do you seek out? "A short one is Rebekka Nathan's mind-blowing book My Freshman Year. An anthropologist, who goes native under a pseudonym, passes as a returning student and lives in a dorm as a freshman of the public university where she teaches. What I learned is how irrelevant we are to our students.
"Another resource has been the biggest renewal piece of my career. I hope others can learn from it as a model. When I started teaching US women's history over thirty years ago, it was the beginning of a new field. A colleague at UCLA got a grant from the NEH to have a curriculum conference for those of us teaching this new field. In 1978, 15 of us went to UCLA for a one-time, one-day teaching workshop-and we have been meeting for thirty years ever since. . . . We created a network and perpetuated this group that has now a cohort of 25 people. Every year, we volunteer to facilitate part of the day on a topic that we picked the year before and spend a whole day talking about how to revise our teaching. It was out of that workshop that my freshmen seminar emerged one day.