Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University (Page 5)
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
Leading Class Discussions
Ryan Boyd: "That's reassuring! Could we now talk about small-classroom discussions?"
Porter Abbott: "There are a few things I want to say, besides the usual cautions – like always look at your students. I had a sociology professor who looked out the window the whole time he taught. In the first class he said, ‘You may be wondering why I'm looking out the window. It's because I'm scared stiff.' Of course, the cure for that fear is not looking away. Just the reverse.
“But the hardest thing to master, I think, and yet the most important, in a discussion, is the ability to send out a question and then to field it in the following way: first put the reply in your own words, then check that you’ve got it right, while all the time thinking of a way to turn it back into a follow-up question, and sending it back out. The rephrasing part is important because I believe the most important thing for the student is to be understood. Even if she's way off base, she’s been heard.
"Ironically, the great danger is that we're really interested in this stuff, and we have lots of ideas about it, and we really want to share them. This is fine talking with your colleagues, it’s fine at conferences, and it’s fine with what you publish, but with students it has to be curbed. I never fully succeeded at this either, much as I tried.
"The first obligation is to those students, and getting those students to think, and to think and formulate, and to see that they can do it."
RB: "But not overloading them with information."
PA: "Not going off on your own, into your own fun with this field. In class discussion, you don't want to make you the subject. I mean, you can sometimes be the subject in a lecture, and at the beginning of a discussion class you can talk a bit to provide necessary information and (I find students really like this) summarize the high points of the discussion in the last meeting, and maybe at the end of class you can summarize and do some looking ahead. But the main thing is helping them learn what it means to discuss.
“So now the next obvious question you're going to ask is 'What happens when they don't say a thing?' One way to handle this is to develop an absurdity. You develop a reading, say, that is really politically incorrect or shocking or stupid or anything like that. And if there's still silence, I sometimes say, nicely as I can, 'Well, it looks like we've wrapped that up. OK, we all agree.' This will frequently get somebody going. Somebody will get moved to speak, will see what I'm doing and won't want to leave it at that.
"I know a lot of my colleagues are very good at putting students into groups and having them talk. I think that's beautiful if you can get it going. I've never done it, but I've always admired people who have been able to do it, and profit from it. But I'm always aware of the time going. Losing time. That might be another weakness I have.
"I like to get students to talk who don't normally talk. So I think it's very important to learn all of their names as soon as possible. Sometimes when I’ve asked a question, and nobody's answered, I go to that silent student and I ask them. I’m doing it for the student; I’m not picking on the student, though sometimes he’ll get beet-red, maybe because he won't have read the material. But you know, if they haven't read the material, they should pay some kind of price, just so they can be motivated to read it in the future. So those are a few of the things that have worked for me."
RB: "Do you enjoy discussion sections more than lecturing?"
PA: "Yes, I do. I've never thought of myself as a very good lecturer. I think that's because of my persona: I tend to wear my ego on my sleeve. And my voice, it can be oratorical; and my language, it can be baroque. I can lose the students, and that's the last thing I want to do. But in a discussion section I feel I have a connection, and even if it's a thirty-five-student class I try constantly to make that connection so that I don't leave them and wander off on something.
“I have worked with some success in the related art of giving a paper. The trick here is to speak it rather than to read it, and to put one’s demonstration texts up on overheads or PowerPoint. In this way, my audience is not looking down at some hand-out, but looking up at the screen where I can point to what I’m talking about.
"Bullet points, on the other hand, I think are a big mistake, except perhaps to sum up the points at the end, or the points that you're going to make at the beginning. I believe that when you use bullet points, you're communicating through two modes, vision and speech. It runs the risk of creating a subliminal anxiety of multi-tasking. More is less, in this regard."
RB: "That experience of forty years of working with students who are, even when they're motivated and intelligent, lay people compared to academic specialists [...] Has that experience of teaching undergraduates contributed to your ability to clarify things for yourself when you're working with academic peers?"
PA: "Absolutely. There's just no question about that. I think nothing keeps us honest in this profession more than having to explain what we mean to someone out of the verbal loop. If we’re going to throw around seven-dollar words, it helps to be aware of the bright student who doesn't know squat about your subject--wants to know, but doesn't know. That's how my Introduction to Narrative came into being: I found that to teach large, two-hundred-student classes, I kept having to add filler to the class reader, clarifying more and more of the terms and concepts I was employing. Then I wrote the book with an intelligent first-year student in mind as my audience – someone with a desire to learn and no preconceptions about the subject.
“So, yes, this is no new insight: teaching is one of the best aids to research. And as I've said, we are always getting a bit too comfortable with our language. Writing for each other, our language can easily get habitual. Nothing breaks our discursive habits better than having to talk to students who don't know anything about the subject."
Page 5
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
