In fall term 2024, we participated in a teaching circle that brought us into one another’s classrooms and generated helpful conversations about our diverse pedagogical strategies. It was wonderfully constructive, reminding us of the very real pleasure of hosting smart, supportive colleagues in our teaching spaces. Observing other professors’ teaching outside of any kind of evaluative review process was an experience that we encourage more faculty to adopt. More than just learning from one another, we also ended up buoying one another’s confidence and commitment to growing as teachers.
Although we are in different disciplines, we found we shared many strategies around our key learning goals, especially those related to facilitating discussion, perhaps because the courses were all at the 100-level. We witnessed one another carefully framing discussion questions and deliberately setting up dialogue in small groups that were later integrated into full-classroom conversations. Each of us emphasized student engagement, using content-delivery as a part of these broader, collaborative instructional goals. We shared a particular value on being explicit in signaling metacognitive moments in the classroom, a strategy that we found to be useful for students in these introductory courses. It was in these moments where having an expert teacher observe our teaching mattered: for example, because Susannah came to one of Anita’s classes later in the term, she asked useful questions about the kind of referencing Anita was making to course readings earlier in the term and suggested that she slow down and emphasize these connections. This was a particularly helpful observation because Anita and her departmental colleagues have had conversations about how to ensure that there are important themes that are made visible and emphasized throughout the various courses in the Educational Studies minor. Some of our most helpful moments in our debriefing meetings were when we were able to talk through how we had set up those moments and how well our goals were met based on each other’s observations.
Where we differed most notably, and had most to teach each other, was in some of the specific tools, routines, and rules we deployed in structuring our classroom environments. Susannah and Anita saw the value of Lin’s A&I students being habituated to have discussion notebooks, annotated source material, and writing implements out and ready to go before the class began. Anita’s use of Google Docs and Sheets to have students capture and share their group work was a helpful reminder of the continuing utility of tools that we learned to embrace during online teaching experimentation. In her peer review workshops, Susannah walked her students through a template that provided necessary structure for her first-year writers, aligned with their final rubric to reinforce expectations early, and still left plenty of space and time for students to build trust and a shared purpose and dive deeply into each other’s writing.
Two of our courses were A&I’s and one was a gateway course for a minor, which led to interesting questions about the role of discussion. While we all featured discussion heavily, we sometimes found that our goals differed: while in the A&I’s, we were focused more on the skills of academic discourse than the content, Anita needed to focus on both so that students gained specific knowledge required for later courses. This shaped when we chose to interject or push students further versus moving on. Relatedly, we saw the clear benefits of teaching the same course multiple times, with the latitude to constantly tweak it! Anita remarked on many occasions that the clear connections between the different components of her course, from one reading to the other, and between levels of reading, were made possible in part by her deep familiarity with the course and how its many parts fit together.
While it was not always possible, we aimed to schedule a little time after each observation to reflect on and summarize our notes for ourselves and pull out themes, then meet shortly thereafter, while it was still fresh. Our midterm and final meetings to discuss our observations made clear for us the joy and fun we have when we engage in the nitty-gritty details of pedagogical strategies and values with each other, sharing not only what we appreciated about each other’s pedagogy but also being able to articulate and question the reasons behind our own choices.
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