Week 4 - Slip Slidin’ Away – Subjugating Students’ Spontaneity to Speaker’s Speculative Structure

I was starting to feel guilty about abandoning my preconceived content. Due to having taught this course for the past three years, I had built more slides than a water park. Now, I’m not one of those people who decry PowerPoint as the downfall of teaching. You know the type. The professors who will tell anyone who will listen (and those who don’t want to) that “I don’t use any PowerPoint.” Kind of like people who tell you that they never watch television, or always wash their hands. More than a self-report, it is really intending to judge you for what you do. I spend enough time judging myself; I don’t need any extra help.

Rather than being the downfall of teaching, teaching was downfalling way before PowerPoint. Poor teaching without PowerPoint will become poor teaching with PowerPoint. Similarly, if you are a good teacher and use PowerPoint, odds are that you are going to be a good teacher with PowerPoint. It is a tool, and good craftpersons never blame their tools. Besides, I do make some nice visual slides. They are pretty, and I like the creativity that it can provide in terms of how content is constructed and presented.

But there my slides sat, on my laptop, feeling neglected.

I had carefully created and curated all the information that I thought would be important to the students to fully understand the criminal justice system. A lot of slides. So many slides that I could take the next 13 weeks without having the students have to say a word. Given past performance of the checked-out students in the class, that would likely be the way things were going to go based on past experience.

Now we were going to be entering Week 4, and we had barely touched on those slides. I thought that I had some pretty cool slides. How was I going to fit all of them in? I decided to take a day to go through some ‘content.’ The class has been engaged thus far, surely I could just push through some slides of things I thought they needed to know. Set a foundation. Drop some knowledge.

The result was predictable. Crickets. I was trying to be my entertaining self. But the content was not connecting. Damn. The class became as inert as a sample mounted to a ‘slide’ under a microscope

Then came the following realization, or epiphany: is the goal of the semester to get through content or facilitate learning? We commonly think that covering content and facilitating learning are the same thing. Taken from the faculty perspective, it might be the case. We have devoted our adult lives to the acquiring of information in a particular discipline and through a particular model. We enter into teaching with the desire to transmit that information to people who (we hope) want to learn it. Thus teaching, especially at the college level, is an exercise in replication. We want our students to care about our topics as much as we do.

But often, they don’t. As we found out on Day 1 of the course, the students were here because: 1) they needed an elective, 2) the course time fit their schedule, 3) they heard I was an okay teacher, and 4) the course sounded interesting. At the end of the day, they really didn’t care as much about the content as I did. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t care at all, but that they weren’t as passionate. No matter the size of the content avalanche, this was not going to change. And no amount of assignments was going to force them to care. They would care as much as they needed to in order to get a decent grade, which only meant they cared more about the grade than the content.

This doesn’t mean that the content doesn’t matter, but perhaps not in the amount or extent that I originally thought. Often, faculty approach the amount of content needed for a course in the following manner

(X number of days x Z minutes of class per week) / Y amount of content to covered= number of slides.

It’s a loose equation, but you get the point. It becomes an exercise in how much do I need to cover the stuff I have to in the time allotted. Sounds reasonable given that you are expected to have a syllabus on the first day which lays this out.

However, what this misses is what are the actual things do students interesting, what things are happening that might be relevant to cover, and whether one has the freedom to engage in these serendipitous moments. I have had many conversations with faculty where they say something like, “I would love to talk about (a certain topic) more, but I have to cover this other material.” This is a tragedy. We are saying that we are not going to allow, or faculty do not think they are allowed, to cover material that they are interested in (or the students are interested in) because they have to follow the syllabus.

The coolest kind of slide

This takes me back to my graduate seminar in sociological theory during my PhD program. Soc Theory should be a class where aspiring sociologists are engaged in intense dialogue around the key ideas that are framing and shaping the discipline. Should be. Unfortunately, what we got was a semester of a mimeographed outline (I’m old) that the instructor would read out loud in class. Once in a while, I guess to increase student participation, the students would take turns reading the outlines. Then we would be tested on the outlines. One time, another student started to ask probing questions on a particular theorist (based on the outline), and the professor told the student, “We can’t talk about that now. We have to get through the outline.” I still have those outlines, much like a memento of one of those hard times in life and a reminder that things can get better if you persevere.

It is not that the slides or notes do not have relevance or merit. Rather, it is the presumption that the spontaneity of student curiosity and topic impulse should be subjugated to that presumed order. Class content and topics are not necessarily linear. A linear slide deck assumes a progression through content (as do typed up notes or an outline). It does not correspond to a more dynamic environment, especially the opportunity for student to interject their own topics or ideas, linking whatever content they find interesting to the topics that you want to cover.

Going outside of structured content and slides (or a mimeographed outline) can feel a bit like working without a net. It can be like a performer who is just working off of premises thrown out by the audience. There is an element of stage craft and audience work involved in actively thinking and engaging in the fluid and dynamic environment of the spontaneous classroom. Additionally, a major danger is that the important points that you want students to learn and remember can get lost. Obviously you can just write them down on the board, and there is much to be said for that. The ‘affordances’ of the whiteboard or blackboard (or Smartboard) are in its flexibility. The technology is in service to the craftsman, and not the other way around.

In the spontaneous classroom, because you don’t know where things are going to go, it is really difficult to PowerPoint for this. As we have established, I have slides. Lots of slides. More slides than a blues guitarist. One of the design opportunities is to create a slide technology that integrates with the more fluid dynamics of the spontaneous classroom. You can have slides in your toolbox, and you pull out the one you need when the time is right. I don’t have the answer for what that looks like, but I do know what it needs to do: support a dynamic versus linear conceptualization of the classroom. If we are going to co-design a course, we also need to open up the content to find topics that work to illustrate the principles we are trying to cover, and do it in a way that students can learn from (and not just be entertained by).

Ultimately, we are talking about ‘sliding head first’ into the dynamic and co-designed classroom as an on-going interactional achievement. Such a classroom is going to have risks, like an Improv group experimenting with a ‘game.’ At the same time, the reward has the potential to create a great experience for everyone involved.