On Course

Classroom Transparency

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By James M. Lang

Over the past few weeks, I have observed two English-and-education majors from my college plying their trade at local high schools. Nothing will make a college professor pine for the groves of academe like spending an hour in a secondary-school classroom observing student teachers.

You might think your 50 to 75 minutes of class time as a college instructor are all too brief, but imagine those same time periods cut up by bells ringing, announcements on the P.A. system, and students requesting hall passes or needing forms filled out for various reasons. Imagine that for the first five minutes of your classes, half the students are asking what they are supposed to be doing, and for the last five minutes, the other half are asking if the teacher could please repeat the instructions for the homework.

All of that comes along with students who are still adjusting to the burgeoning production of new hormones, who either don't know or don't care about the conventions of classroom behavior, and who are sitting there because the government mandates it, not because they chose to.

After observing both student teachers, I walked out of their noisy classrooms full of respect and admiration for high-school educators. And when I got back to my quiet office on the college campus, I fell to my knees in thanksgiving. But I also walked out of those high-school classrooms thinking about how the pedagogical methods I had just witnessed might have something to teach those of us who will never have to sign a form that authorizes another human being to go the bathroom.

What struck me was the notion of the lesson plan -- the map of the day's learning that most elementary- and secondary-school teachers are required to draw up for each class, but that many of us at the college level wouldn't know from a last will and testament.

The lesson plans of the student teachers I observed are complex documents that border on legalese. The forms I have seen require the student teachers to identify the link between the day's lesson and some state-mandated skill or chunk of knowledge that students are supposed to know (and that may help them win someday on a game show).

The student teachers write the lesson plans because they have to, of course, and they will continue to have to write them throughout their careers. My wife, who has been teaching for a dozen years at the elementary level, still has to write lesson plans every day.

But I would wager that both student teachers I observed find their lesson plans to be a handy source for helping them respond to a frequent cry from high-school students: "What do we have to learn this for?"

Lesson plans usually explain exactly why the students have to learn what they are learning, and the best student teachers take the time to communicate that at the beginning of the day.

We don't hear that question quite as often in the college classroom, although I suspect that is less because the relevance of our material is so obvious than it is because of the greater savvy of our students. They are aware of how such a question might influence the professor's perception of them, and thus, potentially, their grades.

But even if our students aren't asking that question much, we should be asking it of ourselves more frequently. Go ahead. Ask yourself right now, about the lesson you taught today or the one you will teach tomorrow: What are my students learning this stuff for?

The easy answer, of course, will always be that they are learning it because you are testing them on it, or because they need it to fulfill some departmental or college requirement.

But surely we should all be able to do better than that. Students are paying gargantuan sums of money to sit in our classrooms, and the public-relations material at your college makes all kinds of wild promises about the ways in which your courses will enrich their lives and make them better and smarter people.

I think it's easy enough to explain why a particular course might make a student a better person. It can be a lot more difficult to explain how or why today's 50 minutes will do so.

And yet I'm convinced that the best teachers, even at the college level, are the ones who not only can offer such an explanation, if asked, but take the time to explain it to students, unasked. The ability to construct and deliver such an explanation doesn't depend upon having a lesson plan. But having one each time you teach can help you see the rationale for that day's work more clearly, and can remind you to offer that rationale to students.

Lesson plans at the college level don't need to achieve the level of detail that is required of school teachers. On the contrary, studies have shown that new faculty members tend to overplan, scheduling every moment in a lesson, while more experienced, successful professors use more minimalist, flexible approaches.

I want to make a broader point here than simply arguing for drawing up a lesson plan for each day in the classroom. I want to argue instead for the virtue of a principle that I believe should inform all pedagogical practice: transparency.

The most effective teaching is transparent teaching: Both student and teacher know the reasons for the major decisions about a course, from the choice of texts and classroom activities to the weighting of the grades and the design of the exams.

That may sound like a burdensome task, but, in fact, it requires very little time or effort if your course is well designed. One sentence at the top of each day's lesson plan or lecture notes can serve to tie the day's work to the larger objectives of the course: "Today we will be analyzing poems, developing skills in critical reading that you will need not only for the final paper, but that will help you more generally to become a close reader of any written text you encounter."

Likewise, an introductory sentence on an assignment sheet can accomplish the same task in a small amount of space: "The final paper for the course will be a well-researched argument that should solidify the rhetorical skills we have been practicing this semester and will help you develop new skills in locating and evaluating resources in print and on the Web."

Textbook choices, course-content decisions, grading systems -- all of those can be explained in the syllabus, and emphasized orally, with minimal effort on your part. If you find yourself having trouble explaining your decisions about any of those things, it might signal that you need to rethink them.

I see a corollary here to the old axiom that says you truly learn a subject only after you have taught it. Having to explain the reasons for your teaching might be the best way to ensure that you have good reasons for your classroom decisions. A decision that you can't explain, or that you find yourself reluctant to explain, deserves another look.

Not every single classroom decision requires an upfront explanation from you. In some situations, you may even want students to engage in an activity without knowing the purpose, and only let them in on your thinking afterward.

The important point is that, if called upon to account for any day's work or assignment by your students, you could do it -- and not by pointing them to the final exam, but by describing to them how today's work feeds into a larger arc that will ultimately enrich their lives in some ways, make them smarter, better equipped for careers, or more humane human beings.

The next time you walk into the classroom, imagine a disgruntled student in the back row, face shadowed by a baseball cap, still wearing his coat, his desk completely free of learning implements, raising his hand, and asking: "What are we learning this stuff for?"

Can you answer him?

Update: Last month's column on getting midterm feedback from students included a line about the importance of administrators relying on a variety of methods to evaluate teaching, including "classroom observations."

That line prompted an e-mail message from Bill McKeachie, author of the classic guidebook Teaching Tips, now in its 12th edition.

McKeachie points out two problems with relying on classroom observations to make judgments about teaching, the first of which is reliability. He has used trained observers to conduct classroom observations, and found that it took four to six different observers to produce a reliable score for a teacher. As he points out, having four to six trained observers reporting on a single faculty member represents an enormous investment of time and energy.

More vexing seems to be the problem of getting a valid look at a teacher's competence: "When a teacher is being observed by someone whose rating will affect the teacher's promotion, it seems unlikely that the teacher's behavior will be representative of their typical teaching," he says. "Some teachers will be so anxious that they are unable to do as well as usual; others will put on a better show than normal."

True enough, and all the more reason to conclude that there are no shortcuts to evaluating teaching effectiveness -- effective evaluation demands multiple perspectives, and multiple methods for gathering information about a teacher's techniques, performance, and success in helping students learn.

Many institutions -- including my own -- do include classroom observations as a part of that package of methods, but McKeachie's cautions here are worth keeping in mind.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons From the First Year (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He writes about teaching in higher education and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com