Hoyle's Top Ten

Six months ago, a colleague shared with me this post by Joe Hoyle. (I don't know Hoyle personally but my colleague does.) At first, it might seem like just another of those Top Ten lists, but this one has stuck with me. I’ve revisited it several times, and have been thinking about my own top ten things I’ve learned from teaching. But the more I’ve pondered this, the more I see myself aiming towards Hoyle’s reflections. He’s been teaching for 47 years, that’s more than double the amount of time I’ve been at it. If you’re a teacher, I highly recommend this list.

Instead of coming up with my own top ten (still a work in progress), I will reflect on some of the items on Hoyle’s list.

Coming in at #10: You always have to prepare for class. In particular, Hoyle says “you simply have to be the best prepared person in the room”. This truism holds even as you work to have your students come to class prepared (a constant challenge). I’m pleased to say that #10 is something I’ve continuously worked on. I’m constantly revamping and rehashing my course material to make class better! I hope I’m still doing that after forty years of teaching, but I’m not quite there yet.

#8: Students rarely change over the years. This has mostly been true to my experience as a teacher, at least in terms of academic ability and basic intellectual skills. If I look at the grades students have earned in my class over the years, the distribution hasn’t changed much although I’ve made my classes a tad more challenging over time – adding a tiny bit more depth and nuance to my exam questions, problem sets and in-class exercises. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say my class I’ve upped the ante about 5% over the last couple of decades. It’s not much, and maybe students have coped just fine because I’m improving as a teacher (or at least I hope so). The one thing that I think has changed is that students today are more stressed and I am seeing a larger proportion of mental-health related issues. I think technology and the quickening pace of everything in their lives is a contributing factor, and that they fight a harder battle against distraction.

Of the ten, I’ve pondered #4 the most over the last six months: Helping students understand that they leave each class with Swiss cheese knowledge – it looks solid but it is full of holes. Maybe it’s the Swiss cheese analogy that is easily visualized, but this one made me think about how to help my students avoid self-deception, thinking they know the material when they don’t. While I’ve been tempted to be a tad more confusing to force them to grapple more, I’ve instead steered towards thinking about helping them build conceptual context. It’s only been two weeks of the new fall semester but I feel like I’ve spent more time than usual in my classes providing context for how what they’re learning today fits with what they’ve learned earlier, what is coming up, what the big picture looks like, and why they should care. But I need to improve assessing my approach to see whether I’m making headway. Striking a balance of asking questions directly of my students without being too intimidating is tricky (for me).

Hoyle’s #1 would also be my #1: Great teaching starts when you can convince your students to be adequately prepared when they walk into class. I wish there was a magic bullet to this. I’ve tried many things over the years and I have a set of practices that sort of work. Regular quizzes, highlighting things from the problem sets in class, annotating detailed syllabi, reading questions, etc. I try to balance this with treating them as adults, i.e., not too much hand-holding, but also giving them the opportunity to make their own choices. If a student doesn’t read beforehand, that student will find it more difficult to follow along in class, and hopefully it acts as a wake-up call.

One thing Hoyle does is e-mail his students very regularly in a way that conveys he cares about their success and learning, and that he’s working to help them succeed. This is something I’m not good at doing outside of class and office hours. I have tried not to overburden my students with e-mails, because I’m not sure I would like receiving lots of e-mail from my instructor if I was a student. Maybe I’m projecting, and that I think the university sends me and the students way too much that it starts to get tuned out. But Hoyle’s examples suggest that the quality of the messages is a crucial factor. Maybe I’m lazy, and have not been willing to put in the extra work this would take. Something for me to think about.