Late last week I attended a dinner of faculty. The event, organized by the director of our center for teaching excellence, was intended to allow us a space to explain how and why, selfishly, we enjoy teaching. It didn't work that way (asking a group of faculty to do anything so directed rarely works), but one of the exercises was "visioning," a concept at which I usually scoff, but, desiring to give the folks involved my full attention and diligence I did as asked.
One of the prompts was to describe, understood loosely, how we know that a class session is going well. How would we describe that experience, but not as though we were answering a questions posed by a hiring committee?
So, this is what I wrote with my post-event comments in brackets:
"Fluid Lecture with an embedded Socratic experience" [that sounds like a application letter line]
"Call and Response" [That works for me, like a preacher]
"Preaching without moralizing" [perhaps I am in the wrong profession]
"Lecture is the magic for me, not in the traditional format, but lecture as directed performance art with a large cast of characters who have differing levels of commitment to the process" [a bit wonky]
"Late hard-bop Jazz improvisation (a core of knowledge, 'the American songbook' deconstructed. I think Horace Silver, or Lee Morgan, or Coltrane on 'Crescent.'" [This one works - the students aren't the audience, but the band])
No comments:
Post a Comment