Teaching the Mostly Harmless Way - Part I

Principles, practices, and tools I use in all my teaching endeavors.

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I've been teaching at college for close to 15 years now. In this time, I've changed a lot, as a person and educator. I've developed my own mentality about teaching, why it matters, and how to best do it.

This article attempts to organize and structure my teaching. What follows are the principles, practices, and tools I use. (Actually, this one is only about the core principles. The rest will follow soon.)

This article is very personal and does not claim anyone else should do the same. These ideas work for me, and my teaching style, and my primary reason for sharing them is to give some of you a couple of ideas you may want to try—nothing more.

Fair warning, none of what you'll read in this article is entirely original. I got most of these principles and practices from other educators I've had the privilege of knowing and learning from. Great ideas are meant to be stolen.

However, all of this is tinted and limited by the lens of my own experiences, motivations, and ideals. So, feel free to disagree with anything and everything I share in this article, and take whatever you find relevant or interesting for your practice. As usual, I'd love to know your thoughts!

Principles

These principles inform my teaching practices. I've tried to distil them down to core ideas that can be shared, but of course, there is a lot of nuance in between that got lost in the translation from lived experience to words.

In general, I think these principles may apply to education as a whole across all disciplines and levels, but my experience is almost completely limited to college-level STEM or adjacent disciplines. Needless to say, take all of this with a spoonful of salt.

To me, the most essential teaching principle, and the one that guides it all, is that...

Learning happens in an environment. Basically, there is nothing an educator can directly do to ensure learning occurs inside a student's brain. You cannot simply dump your knowledge there and call it a day. All we can do is influence the environment around the students so that learning emerges as a natural and almost inevitable result.

That environment is primarily composed of the relationships between students and teachers and among students themselves within a shared space—the school—which is why for many, the school, teachers, and students are all that matters.

However, there is much more going on that influences and may ultimately determine the quality of learning. There are parents and friends and other people around students, social media, TV, and video games, and the social and political landscape in which students live. Hell, there is even climate change and wars on the other side of the world—or across the street. You get it.

As educators, we need to be cognizant of these factors, even if we cannot directly modify many of them, so as to design learning experiences that effectively support the type of environment the students live in. Otherwise, no matter how good our lessons and books are, learning cannot happen.

For this reason, lessons need to be at least somewhat ingrained in that environment. I've found that the best way to achieve that is to...

Start with Why. Nobody learns anything if they're not paying attention; people only pay attention to things they care about. As we just said, the environment ultimately determines the outcome of any learning experience. So you have to start by convincing students they care about the stuff they're about to learn.

One way—the worst way—to do so is by invoking exams or grades. A slightly better but still awful way is to invoke some abstract future need—the very common "believe me, this will be useful when you're graduated". Even worse if that future need is just another subject this one is a prerequisite for.

A much better way is to find relevant problems students care about today and build from there—problems that are part of their environment. This is easier said than done, though. Students don't care about many of the really important problems they maybe should care about, often simply because they don't know why they should care about them.

So start with that why. Make it personal, if possible, or at least as close to their personal experience as reasonable. Not all problems can be framed in terms of the current state of society, but many times, we can find some connections, even if the thing you're actually teaching is somewhat abstract.

Don't overdo it, though. A poorly framed connection can be counterproductive because students realise this is just an artificial motivational device rather than a real problem they should care about.

But crucially, in the quest to find pragmatic motivations, don't forget to...

Ask the Big Questions. Even if we prefer to ground the motivation for learning something in personal experience as much as possible, that doesn't mean we shy away from asking big, existential questions.

Almost all practical matters can be abstracted and extended to encompass the meaning of life, metaphorically and literally. And even if we don't get to the big answer in the end, asking the big question elevates the subject and shows students that we are not only concerned with practical matters—although practical matters are often the priority.

Also, the big question can sometimes be the primary motivation. Especially in senior years, once students have learned lots of practical skills in other subjects, having at least one subject matter focused on the big questions can be a great change of pace and a chance to engage in different kinds of critical thinking and learning.

This leads me to what I think is the best order to present complex ideas, that is...

Intuition before formalization. Many classes will begin with the formalization—give you some abstract concepts and definitions someone else thought—and then try to justify why those make sense. Or worse, just take the formalization for granted and move on to solve some artificial problems.

I've found it much easier and useful to tackle a specific formalization once students already have an intuitive grasp of the concepts. Even more, we can build the formalization together, as if they were rediscovering the theory. With a little nudge from the teacher, students will often arrive at the same theory because good theories just make more sense than bad ones.

This principle can be seen as a particular case of a more general principle, that is...

Show, then tell. The original sin of modern education is the "do as I say, not as I do" model. We teach students they should behave in a way—they should think in a way—but rarely show them that behaviour ourselves.

In formal sciences, for example, we tell students that real-life problems are nuanced, that modelling is the most important part of problem-solving, and that they should think critically and creatively. Yet whenever we show them how to solve one problem, we already have a preconceived "correct" modelling and a scripted solution. They rarely see us teachers thinking critically and creatively.

I don't subscribe entirely to the anti-traditionalist ideal of “show, don't tell”, though. Educational environments are purposefully artificial because they are controlled environments where it's safe to fail. So, there is a limit to how much we can show, and we must complement it with telling. But we should embrace the mindsets we advocate as much as possible.

However, in the end, imitation is just one part of learning and not even the primary one. The best way to learn almost anything is to...

Learn by doing. Some subjects can be learned passively, but most essential skills students need are best acquired via active and deliberate practice.

This means any effective learning environment must encourage and support lots of practising. This includes both showing and telling students what to practice and, perhaps more importantly, how to practice effectively.

Plenty of studies, plus common sense, tell us that time spent practising is far less important than how one actually practices. Mindlessly solving the same type of math exercise over and over, for example, is probably a waste of time if you want to build problem-solving skills.

This last part is often forgotten, and thus, students are inundated with resources to practice—exercises, term projects, past exams—but no instructions as to how best to distribute their time or how to evaluate their practice performance. This is why frequent and personalized feedback is the most valuable thing students can get from us.

And if doing is the best way of learning, doing things in teams is even better, because...

Cooperation beats competition. Some students love competition and get a lot of energy from it, and that's good. But more often than not, students prefer cooperation.

Cooperation allows for richer interactions and is often even more challenging than competition. Managing team roles and distributing tasks in a term project is an additional skill that complements whatever technical knowledge they'll gain by just doing the project alone.

Also, cooperation allows for tackling bigger problems—not only bigger in quantitative terms but bigger in scope. Projects that involve background research aren't precisely defined and require some blue/red teaming, for example.

This doesn't mean competition is completely out of the picture. Healthy competition can be a strong motivator. However, when there's competition in my classes, I prefer that it be against an objective standard rather than against other students and that students compete in teams.

Finally, when designing team projects and evaluating work in cooperation, don't forget that...

Every student is different. Some thrive at analytical reasoning, others are better planners and organizers, and still others excel at remembering and recalling large swaths of knowledge.

While we want to form generally well-rounded professionals with a balanced set of relevant skills, this doesn't mean we must strive for, nor desire, an equal mix of abilities in all students. On the contrary, the best teams are those whose members complement each other.

Yet, formal education curricula tend to be designed for one particular type of student—the type of student who is good at gaming exams—and often leave little space to accommodate diverging needs and abilities that may also be as relevant and useful as those that are the primary goal of the educational system.

As educators, we can alleviate this narrow-minded view of schools as factories by designing learning environments that cater to varied learning styles and ensuring there is more than one valid path to success in our courses.

Moving on

This article is already quite long, so I'll leave the practices and tools for a follow-up. Those are even more personal and limited in scope, so they might not be terribly interesting to many of you. If there's interest, please let me know in the comments, and I'll prioritize that article.

In the meantime, I'd love to know your thoughts on these matters. Whether you're an educator yourself or a student (now or a while ago), I'm sure there's something we can all gain from your experience.

Until next time, stay curious.