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by Greg Scheer
[Note: This essay begins with a journal entry and proceeds to examine various models for the role of the teacher: the teacher as lecturer, listener, taskmaster, storyteller, mentor, and provoker.]
November 20, 2001 Journal Entry:
Today my MUS115 class tanked. It was the afternoon of the Tuesday before break so I assumed that many of the students would be gone. I thought that it would be great to have something special in the class that would make it worthwhile for the students who stayed, so I decided to have a class discussion about an article we had read.
The basic premise of the article was that worship's shift away from choirs, organ, and "high" art music toward contemporary pop is not just one of style but one of theology. Rigorously composed and presented music is a better reflection of God's nature than lowest-common-denominator pop music. And pop music by its very nature trivializes the message of the Gospel.
I have noticed that the students are very relativistic in their thinking-all music is good as long as the worshiper's heart is right-so I thought that having a class discussion about the article (which they had also just written about in a reflection question) would be a good way of going deeper into the subject.
I was wrong.
We sat in a circle to encourage more eye contact and interaction. I asked questions. I repeated back what they said. I asked them further questions about their comments. I asked others to discuss previous comments. I pleaded.
Nothing worked.
Of the class of 40 about 3 were at all interested in the subject. Most looked mildly annoyed that I would cut into their Thanksgiving break with something that wasn't going to be on the test. Others did homework. One, once she figured out that I wasn't going to lecture, packed up her back pack and sat on the edge of her seat with her back pack in her hands until I dismissed them.
It was pretty painful.
It's making me rethink all the things that we're talking about in the Pedagogy Project. On the one hand, I agree with the basic principle of putting the ball in the students' court. On the other hand, I'm finding it extremely difficult to do this successfully. The fact is that most students are not here for an education, they're here for a diploma. I am not an educational mentor or a friend on the path to enlightenment, I'm an obstacle that they have to overcome on their way to employment.
There. I've said it.
I've started giving them reflection questions to see if they're just unwilling to voice their opinions in front of the class. I've given them research papers to help them develop a love for hunting down the meat of a subject. I've had them discuss things in pairs and small groups. I've had them reflect on another student's reflection paper. It just doesn't seem like they are willing or capable of thinking on a deeper level. The reflection questions are always answered in the least resistance sort of way: "I think death metal worship music is okay as long as it's sincere and it ministers to people." Are they just lazy or are they really incapable of thinking something through?
About the only time they started to discuss a subject with any commitment at all was when Nathan Corbitt visited the class. He provoked them like crazy-basically calling them square, self-absorbed, white racists-and they actually rose to the challenge. (I was sure that there was going to be a fist fight...)
Perhaps that's the answer: pose all questions in the most confrontational way in order to get a rise out of the students. Instead of beginning a conversation with "Do you think the medium affects the message?" I could say "I think what you students do at Sunday night praise and worship is a shallow and trivial form of worship that forms shallow and lazy Christians." Kick the sacred cow right in the shin to see if it jump-starts discussion.
The other possibility would be much easier on all of us. I could simply go back to lecture style teaching. If my lectures were reasonably engaging nobody would be particularly unhappy with me. The students who are there to get a grade could sit there and dutifully take notes, so they could take a multiple choice exam, get their A, and be one step closer to graduation. The engaged students are going to be thinking more deeply about what they learn anyway.
Deep down I know there must be more to the educational process, but I just don't know how to bring it about when half the students don't seem to give a crap. I've often thought it would be really cool to just announce at the beginning of the semester that everyone will receive an A, so any student who doesn't care to work for the A can leave. That would create an environment in which the remaining students would be there simply to learn.
I wonder how that would fly with the Dean...
If you're a teacher, you know the emotional roller coaster that can occur from day to day, semester to semester. Just when you think you've got everything figured out, it all unravels. It was this type of stomach-churning ride of teaching highs and lows that I hoped to smooth out when I signed up in Fall of 2001 for the Pedagogy Project on the campus of Northwestern College.
The brainchild of Northwestern professor Barb Turnwall and in collaboration with the Iowa Writers' Project, the intent of the yearlong project was to teach Northwestern professors how to teach. While this might sound like remedial help for incompetent teachers, it's actually a quite logical approach-college professors have training in their specific disciplines, but don't necessarily have any training in the art of teaching their disciplines.
I am Director of Music Ministries at Northwestern College, a hybrid position split between teaching worship and music courses as part of the music department, and leading chapel worship and overseeing other music ministries as part of Northwestern's campus ministries. This split position allows for richer (and more complicated) relationships with students. I am "Professor Scheer" to the students in my classes and "Greg" to those who work with me on my worship teams. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap between those who interact with me on an academic and a ministry level. The positive aspect of this overlap is that there is an organic structure in place which allows me to teach a concept in the classroom and then give the students hands-on experience with it in a worship setting. Essentially, this structure is a similar paradigm to the Baroque Kappelmeister, who was responsible for providing music for worship services and civic events, composing new music, training the boys in the choir school, and being somewhat of a surrogate father to the church musicians.
Because of this structure, many of my classes have a significant mentoring aspect built into them. In fact, many of my music ministry classes have under 10 students, so I am able to run them more like seminars than lectures. Further, I see the same students for a number of years in both the classroom and worship setting, so I am able to help them develop as whole people rather than just as students. This wonderful environment is conducive to education, ministry, and the development of the whole person.
The one exception to the small-class, built-in-mentoring norm I usually enjoy is MUS115: Music of the Church. This is an introductory level general education course of 35-45 students which is required for music ministry majors, recommended for youth ministry and pre-seminary students, and the lesser of other evils for many other students. The fact that the class is a liberal arts requirement means that many of the students simply don't want to be there. Further, worship is a subject in which they have a good deal of experience (and baggage). I imagine that Biblical Studies and Political Science professors experience a similar dynamic-students already read the Bible, worship, and vote so they arrive with deeply held convictions and are often unable to become objective learners or are unwilling to even discuss concepts that fall outside of their existing framework. Some students take on an "us and them" mentality if the material challenges their beliefs; others feel that things like worship and the Bible shouldn't be dissected, but experienced in a comfortable setting like a Bible study.
Therefore MUS115 has been my greatest pedagogical concern and the one on which I wanted to concentrate during the Pedagogy Project. I see MUS115 as an opportunity to introduce students to new and different forms of worship; I want them to connect their current church experience with the historical worship movements that we study in class. Even the students who won't be directly involved in music ministry in the future will probably be pastors, elders, and leaders of tomorrow's churches, so I see it as my mission to give them the theological, historical, and global context to think more deeply about worship. While a small percentage of the students "get it" and seem genuinely grateful that I have given them a vocabulary for the ideas that were already forming in their heads, many of the students leave MUS115 further entrenched in their previous way of viewing worship. They tend to see worship as a personal, pietistic practice outside of the realm of study and all worship issues as "traditional vs. contemporary." I believe they are also heavily influenced by the ever-increasing reach of the commercialized worship industry.
My goal in MUS115 is to challenge students' basic assumptions about worship; interestingly, the Pedagogy Project did a similar thing to my thoughts on teaching. Perhaps I expected to be given foolproof teaching tricks or new lecture techniques; instead, facilitator Jim Davis simply created the space for the participants to step back and evaluate basic assumptions about teaching. Using books such as Donald Finkel's Teaching with Your Mouth Shut and Mary Rose O'Reilly's Radical Presence we explored methods of what I would call "unteaching." The books posited that students learn more when given the space to discover things for themselves rather than simply being told the "right" answers. Various methods of creating the space for student discovery were proposed, from the straightforward (student-led discussions and written lectures) to the surreal (spend the whole period without saying a word).
I found these ideas both compelling and frightening. And frustrating. On the one hand I became convinced that lecturing is overrated at best and ineffective at worst, on the other hand I felt that the idea of giving the class entirely over to the students was sheer folly.
As I attempted to regain my intellectual equilibrium, I was forced to try to balance my original assumptions about teaching (a good lecturer is a good teacher) against the paradigm promoted in the Pedagogy Project (lecturing rarely leads to learning). I reflected back to my original answers to Finkel's question, "Name the most important learning experiences in your life." At the time I pointed out my year abroad in Austria, undergraduate composition lessons with Dr. Gibbs, beginning German with Frau Crossgrove, and an honors seminar in Shakespeare with D. Anne Hammond, and I concluded that these were all important because they were hands-on, non-lecture situations.
I had fallen right into his trap! Certainly these were memorable experiences (it's hard to evaluate importance even in hindsight), but I had jumped to the Finkelesque conclusion that there was some sort of subversive pedagogical throughline to these learning situations. In fact, each one was important for very different reasons: Austria was a pivotal time of personal growth and immersion in German, Dr. Gibbs was my first composition teacher, Frau Crossgrove was a very charismatic lecturer, and Dr. Hammond was about the only professor I ever had who came close to teaching with her mouth shut.
On further reflection, I added freshman music theory to my list of pivotal learning experiences and I reevaluated my original conclusion. I decided that my list of educational high points and my overall experience as a student and professor showed that there are many effective ways to skin the educational cat. With this premise I began to reflect upon a broad range of pedagogical paradigms and brainstorm about ways that they could be used in my class.
This is the model of teaching that is the de facto standard for college professors, and the one upon which we are usually judged. Perhaps the reason that lecturing so rankles the likes of Finkel and O'Reilly is that so much importance and prestige is placed on a teaching method that can be useless in many situations. Certainly, dry recapitulation of the textbook is a waste of class time, but I believe that there is still a place for lecturing. Perhaps a parallel could be made between lecturing and preaching: the presence of other pedagogical options doesn't invalidate this particular method.
On a personal level, what I gained from my new healthy suspicion of lecturing is that I needed to expand my pedagogical bag of tricks rather than simply hone my oratory skills. I now try to implement what increases student learning rather than concentrating on the quality of my teaching. The most prominent change in my practice because of this new way of thinking is that I've tried to remove information dissemination from the class time. In one of my journal entries I arrived at the following way of structuring the class to create space in the class time for non-lecture learning:
Preparation: information gathering
Reading, study questions, and quizzes
Class Time: grappling with ideas as a group
Lectures that flesh out the material with anecdotes and examples
Discussions, projects, and analysis
Post-Class: personal reflection
Essay questions, papers, and email discussion
This is not a groundbreaking form, but it did give me a place to start as I attempted to work out the details of my new, student-learning-driven philosophy.
Because my course changed from a Tuesday, Thursday in the Fall to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule in Spring I took the opportunity to change to a routine which included two days of lecture, and one day for projects. On project days the class split into groups for discussion, work on class presentations, and to try their hand at writing metrical Psalms or analyzing the theology of a lyric. The results of these projects were mixed, but overall the process of actually working with the materials was a good learning opportunity for the students.
Another change I made to the structure of the course was to add an overview at the beginning of the semester. In the past I had continued to be disappointed by the students' ability to grasp the larger picture of worship throughout time, so this semester I created a chart that mapped Christian worship chronologically, denominationally, and geographically. With that chart in hand we took a dizzying 50-minute tour of church music. I feared it would be a futile experiment in information overload, but the students did a much better job this semester understanding how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
I guess I'm a postmodern, because I believe that change in belief or practice, especially in an area like worship, comes through experience. In light of this I tried to increase the amount of experiential learning that went on in MUS115. One way was to increase the number of musical examples used during lectures. "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" as performance artist Laurie Anderson says, so when I discussed complex musical issues like polyphony I played a CD to illustrate the concept. This semester I made a particular effort to guide their listening ("This is the theme-now here's the counter theme") and use recorded examples from Northwestern's choir or one of my own church choirs whenever possible. Any hymnody or psalmody, and even some simple chant and polyphony, was sung by the whole class. In the Fall the class seemed to enjoy the musical examples as a diversion from taking notes, but the Spring semester's class was genuinely interested in hearing the music and would complain if I only played a portion of the recording!
O'Reilly's model of teacher as a listening cow is interesting, but perhaps unrealistic. I would like to believe that simply presenting the students with the gift of respectful ears would call forth the caged thinker hiding deep inside, but that might be expecting too much. In fact, I would contend that there is a basic flaw in the listening model: it presumes that the student knows what he or she needs to learn. I object; though the student has to grapple with concepts at some point in the learning process, the teacher needs to give shoulders to stand on before that can happen. To use a child-rearing example, you have to teach a child not to play in the street by telling (a word used negatively in Finkel's teaching model) so that they don't have to learn by dying.
I'll admit some valuable traits of the listening model. It seems that O'Reilly's use of silence, listening, and pregnant pauses is effective in creating a vacuum that the students will feel compelled to fill. In the same way that a lull in conversation always draws banter, the use of silence in the classroom can be used to draw the students into a more active role in the classroom. However, my journal entry shows that this isn't a foolproof technique...
Though my attempts to apply O'Reilly's methods of increasing student involvement in the classroom have only been partially successful, I don't want to give up on the ideal of increasing the reflection phase of student learning, and I plan to turn much of my attention to this area in the future.
Next year I will have three student tutors to help with the class. In the past I have only used these assistants to lead study sessions before exams, but next year they will take on the role of mentor to the students in the class. My hunch is that students will be much more willing to try out ideas with a fellow student than they will with me. Therefore, I plan to assign a group of 10-15 students to each assistant. The assistant will facilitate discussion, serve as a resource for papers and exams, and give feedback on reflection essays. I hope that the smaller group size will foster a camaraderie which is unlikely to grow in the larger class; at the same time I hope that it will be a growing experience for the assistants, all of whom are music ministry majors.
Another outlet for reflection will be an email list. There are a number of discussion questions that I no longer use during lectures because of the difficulties of large group dynamics, and many homework reflection questions for which I am unable to give useful feedback in a class this size. I will redirect these into an online class discussion. This will also be a place where they can discuss other worship questions such as things that happen in chapel, Sunday night praise and worship, or in their local churches. I hope that the online medium gives them enough of a social buffer that they will feel comfortable expressing themselves, but that they will also be conscious that their ideas will be evaluated by their peers. I have not yet decided how I will grade their activity on the list.
In order to model the type of discussion and reflection that I am trying to encourage in the classroom and on the email list, I may try interviewing various guests throughout the semester. According to my teacher evaluations, some students perceive me to be intolerant of what others believe about worship. I think that I may give that appearance because I have wrestled with an idea before presenting it to the class. If the students could see me grappling with issues alongside them, it may foster a stronger sense of collaboration between teacher and student.
I think back to my freshman music theory experience and I realize that it was the backbreaking, repetitive work that forced me to learn the material. Like math, music theory is something that is learned over time rather than in a colossal "aha!" moment. A student may understand the concept of multiplication and be eager to move on, but the taskmaster teacher pushes their noses to the grindstone and makes them repeat each equation 10, 20, or 100 more times.
I discovered last year that students rarely read or comprehended texts which were assigned in preparation for the class. It then became my responsibility to recapitulate the textbook information during class time, which took away from more effective and interesting learning tools. This year I decided to force the students to enter the class with a basic understanding of the material by giving them homework questions or quizzes on the readings. For each reading I provided a dozen questions that narrowed the scope of what I felt was important in the reading and introduced them to the "factoids" that would appear later on tests. At the beginning of class they would either hand in their homework or take a short quiz on the material-another way of insuring that they were learning the material. Truth be told, the questions are pretty rudimentary (e.g. Bach lived from ___ to ___); however, they allowed me to delve more quickly into the meat of a topic because the students were already warmed up. On the student evaluations of the class, some students found the questions mind-numbing and others thought they were a helpful study tool. You can't please everyone.
I also added a number of articles to the list of assigned readings this year. The pragmatic reason for doing this was to fill in gaps in the textbook (Pentecostal and contemporary worship, for example, were not covered in depth), but it also expanded the variety of voices that the students heard throughout the semester and increased the opportunities for navigating differences of opinion. In fact, I tended to choose articles that crossed boundaries, raised questions and pushed buttons.
Christ used storytelling as a teaching tool, and it certainly seems appropriate for a Christian liberal arts professor to follow his example! A teacher can use a story to convey information, weaving the facts of a lecture into an interesting narrative. Stories can also bring the listener's guard down and create a safe distance when approaching delicate subjects. And a teacher's first-person stories can help build intimacy and trust between the teacher and students that will provide a foundation for further learning.
I may be able to use storytelling to combat two recurring problems that I have noticed in MUS115: students tend to personalize issues rather than study them objectively, and they frequently simplify issues into preexisting categories such as traditional versus contemporary. Using the teacher-as-storyteller paradigm, I have considered using parables to avoid these problems. I envision creating narrative with a fictional couple who have ongoing discussions about issues in their church. The stories would allow students to step into a worship conflict in a psychologically safe way to experience the nuances of various historical or theological worship issues.
One of my favorite paradigms for teaching once again uses Christ as a model. Mentoring, or the biblical term discipleship, requires a life investment on both the part of the mentor and mentoree. Maybe it is an impossible model for a situation that requires grading, diplomas, tuition, and salaries, but I affirm "being with" as a way of teaching on the deepest level. My role at the college allows for quite a bit of mentoring. In fact, I have a hard time separating what parts of my time are ministry and which are teaching. It makes things complicated during staff/faculty evaluations, but it is very rewarding on a day-to-day basis, and I suspect it adds to my students' learning tremendously.
If the role of mentor is a ten on a touchy-feely scale, the role of provoker falls a little less than a one. But once again, it is a role that Jesus often played. Chasing money changers out of the temple, calling Pharisees a brood of vipers, and answering questions with more questions were all ways of shocking people into thinking. Granted, it's not the kind of technique that leads to Teacher of the Year accolades or even tenure, but it certainly works. As I described above, guest lecturer Nathan Corbitt was able to knock my Fall MUS115 class off balance enough that they rose from their intellectual stupor and fought back. Having Nathan play this role with the class was beneficial because suddenly I became the "good cop" that could help them work through issues once the "bad cop" was gone. However, I don't know how useful it would be to provoke a class that you had to be with for the rest of the semester.
The Pedagogy Project challenged me to think for myself about difficult and important questions. I still have questions, but I also have more answers. I feel equipped to honestly reflect on my practice and make changes based on effective learning rather than effective teaching.