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The Benefits of Eavesdropping

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By James M. Lang

Standing before my students, I explain the brief writing assignment -- usually a 10-minute exercise at the beginning of class -- and hover over their desks until I see them all begin to put their pens to work.

Then I sidle towards the corner doorway that my room shares with an adjacent classroom. I lean against the wall, tilt my head imperceptibly toward that neighboring classroom, and for 10 delicious minutes indulge in one of my guiltiest academic pleasures:

I eavesdrop on the classes of my colleagues.

While my students scratch away diligently at their writing exercises about symbolism in James Joyce's short story, "Araby," I am entranced by the thundering proclamations of a colleague in philosophy, whose lively dialogues with students recall to me my days as an undergraduate philosophy minor.

In another nearby classroom, I catch only the musical selections from my soft-spoken colleague's class on music history; it sounds like a late-night-advertised selection of greatest hits from the best-loved classical composers, a program punctuated by silent time between each piece for my quiet reflection on the subtleties of the composition.

This semester, while my students work on their essays in my creative nonfiction seminar, I've been catching up on my Greek tragedy, listening in on a comparative-literature course that has reminded me about the complex role of the chorus in Greek drama, and the mechanisms of Athenian democracy.

I know I am invading my colleagues' privacy as I conduct these surreptitious eavesdropping sessions, even if that invasion never crosses the thresholds of their classroom doors.

But I can't help myself.

The Lure of the Unknown

I listen in part because I am intrigued and seduced by what I don't know: by the Greek tragedies I will never have time to read, by the symphonies I will never have time to appreciate, by the questions I will never have enough philosophical training to ask or understand in their richest contexts.

Like many of my colleagues, I often dream about sitting in on courses that spark my curiosity. Just about every semester I toy with the idea of taking an introductory piano course, or brushing up on my Spanish or French. I have even spoken idly of shedding my responsibilities and pursuing whole new degrees, maybe in zoology or art history or anthropology.

With seven classes to teach every year, a writing career, a wife who also teaches full time, three children and -- God help us -- a pair of twins on the way, I understand fully just how idle those dreams will remain.

Ten-minute lessons, for the foreseeable future, are the best I'm going to get.

But I will confess further that academic curiosity, and the desire to enrich my intellectual life, are not the only motives for my eavesdropping.

During the three years I spent as the assistant director of a teaching center at another university, the best part of my job was observing the classes of my colleagues. My role during those observations was to take notes on what I saw, and afterward provide the professors with confidential analysis and advice on their pedagogical strategies.

I may have helped a teacher or two, but I was the real beneficiary in the transaction.

I learned a few things about the world around me, for starters. During one lecture on Bernoulli's principle, I completely lost a 10-year phobia of flying as an engineer explained to the class how the shape of a plane's wings, and a basic principle of physics, keep planes aloft, as they are lifted into the air by higher pressure below the wing than above it.

In a film class in which students were presenting their short documentary films to the class for critique, the instructor's commentary on each film enlightened me about a host of tricks of the filmmaker's trade, techniques that I now notice in the films I see on the big screen.

But mostly what I learned about was teaching.

I saw teachers using interactive pedagogical strategies that seemed so brilliant to me that I stole them shamelessly and was trying them out in my own class later that week. I saw others interacting with students in condescending or dismissive ways that I vowed never to replicate. More often than not, I saw little kernels, both good and bad, that I wanted either to make my own or to distance myself from in the classroom.

I saw classes in which students were jumping out of their seats with excitement, and classes in which the students' somnolence or hostility were a palpable presence in the room. The successful classes gave me ideas for my own classroom; the failing ones made me feel a whole lot better about the classes in which I utterly bombed.

But good or bad, every class I observed taught me something new.

When I left that post to become an assistant professor, and left behind the job of observing the teaching of others, I found that I missed that responsibility most immediately and most acutely. Never had teaching felt like such an isolated and lonely enterprise to me as it did during my first year on the tenure track, away from those chances to observe my colleagues in the classroom.

The Real Thing

I mitigated that sense of isolation somewhat by joining with a group of colleagues who sponsor several teaching colloquia every year, open discussions for faculty members on some designated topic related to teaching. In those colloquia, I heard -- and hear still -- excellent ideas from my colleagues that I steal for my own classroom.

But listening to people talk about their teaching, and observing them actually teach, are two very different activities.

We all know how even the best teaching ideas can fail in the classroom. You overestimate the background knowledge of the students, or you haven't timed the exercise properly, or you needed one more overhead to clarify the instructions. When I watch someone use a strategy that seems terrific in theory, but that runs aground because of logistical problems, I can make adjustments to correct those problems when I practice the same strategy, and thus have a much more successful experience.

So I need the real thing. I need to see and hear people in practice. I want to teach as well as I possibly can, and I know from experience that in-class observation can help tremendously in my efforts at self-improvement.

Short of becoming a dean or department head -- roles in which I have less than zero interest -- or burdening myself with the work of the promotion-and-tenure committee, I know my job as an assistant professor of English won't normally get me into other people's classrooms.

I have, however, thought of one legitimate means I could propose in order to gain entry to the private zones of my colleague's classrooms.

I could organize a group of like-minded colleagues who would take turns sitting in on each other's classes, simply to observe one another for the sake of observation -- or, more precisely, for the sake of stealing good ideas. I don't imagine it would prove too difficult to organize, and it could have tremendous payoffs in our pedagogical lives.

But I will confess that, with all of the other obligations I have to fulfill in my teaching and writing and family lives, I find the prospect of adding classroom observations to my schedule a daunting one. I would be the first to jump on board such a group if someone proposed it to me -- but I would be the first to jump right back off when I had a stack of 50 papers to turn around, or a writing deadline to meet.

So, for the time being, it looks like I'll be settling for eavesdropping -- the one form of observation that I can conduct in short spurts while I am fulfilling my own teaching obligations.

But I have been thinking that maybe I should conduct my eavesdropping in a less haphazard way.

We have the chance each semester to put in requests for the classrooms we will use in the following semester. Until now I have always requested rooms in the newest classroom building, with all of its glorious board space and its climate-controlled environment.

I think next year my requests will look a little different:

"Please give me the classroom next to 'Music History II' ... preferably a section taught by someone with a loud, clear baritone."