How Will You Try To Improve Your Teaching?
Hello, fellow academics, it’s August 1st, the date that indicates the summer is, sadly, soon over. Amidst the scramble to meet deadlines and knock items off of that to-do list, it’s also time to make sure you’re prepared for your teaching.
I thought it might be helpful if readers shared their plans for how they’ll be changing things up in their classrooms. Any new teaching techniques you’re trying out? Any interesting new material or topics? Any pedagogical problems you’re looking to overcome?
Here are a few previous teaching-related posts that might be useful as you go about finishing up that syllabi:
- The Student Recap
- Philosophy Teaching Games
- Small Changes to Class Meetings
- Argument Mapping
- In-Class Poster Sessions
- A Very Detailed Paper-Grading Rubric
- Be a Skillful and Respectful but not Overly Cautious Teacher
(it’s unlikely you’ll get in trouble with the administration or get protests from students) - Emphasize Imagination
- Use Content Warnings (or at least warn them that you won’t)
- Group Work in Philosophy Class
- Comedy Clips for Philosophy Teaching (and more on the use of humor in class)
- Teaching Priorities Post-Trump
- Role of the Professor in Students’ Lives, and their really personal lives
- Expressing Your Intimidating Opinions in Class (also here)
- In Defense of the Lecture
- Getting Students to Read
- Teaching The Meaning of Life
- Student-Made Philosophy Music Videos
- Using the “Philosophers On” Posts as Teaching Tools
- Remember that Most of Our Students Will not Be Philosophers
- What Students Owe Their Professors
Posts about resources elsewhere:
- TeachPhilosophy101
- Blog of the APA Teaching Workshop Series
- Open Access Philosophy Textbooks
- Diversity Reading List in Philosophy
- In Socrates’ Wake: a blog about teaching philosophy
I’m sure I missed a few so feel free to add helpful links, too.
This issue title is fine, but sometimes the titles are opaque. Given that Nous reaches us in our email queue, it is easy to discard when the subject/title is not very informative. Take heed, please.
I’m going to try a new activity–a “McTuring Test”. Students need to think of questions they could ask Siri or Google Assistant to show that neither is a person. They’ll ask Siri the questions, record the answers, and try to make a case. Hopefully it goes well.
thanks for posting this, Justin! super helpful.
Thanks for the links. Some of these are already helpful. There is one thing I wish that someone would do that I don’t see in these links, and honestly haven’t seen anywhere, and that’s a compilation of annotated syllabi for common lower level philosophy classes besides Intro like Critical Thinking, Introduction to Ethics, and that applied ethics class every school has but calls something different. It would be really helpful to see what other people do in these sorts of classes and to see their explanations why.