• pedagogy
• the profession

I realized the other day that I now feel perfectly comfortable and confident whenever I teach an undergraduate class. Yet I still feel vaguely incompetent every time I teach a graduate class. The norm for graduate classes where I went 30 years ago was usually that students did a lot of reports and professors never lectured. One professor actually grilled students on the assigned readings--this really worked, but I never found that this technique worked for me, inveterate people-pleaser that I am. I never understood why professors didn't lecture, since after all they knew more about the subject than that weird student who worked Zen Buddhism into every reading. About ten years ago I settled on the format that I now still use (our graduate classes are 3 hours, one night a week): lecture for about an hour on the assigned reading or some theoretical/historical background needed to make sense of the reading, an oral report or two, then discussion of questions on the reading that students have submitted the day before and that I've collated into a manageable form. I try, especially in theory classes, to make students conscious of admitting what terms, concepts, people they don't know, so I can fill in these "literacy" gaps. Anyway, what's the norm for conducting a graduate class in your shop?

• Jim Aune's blog
• Login or register to post comments