Every instructor has to develop his or her own teaching style. However, there are some tried-and-true methods that can serves as models. In a distance learning environment, written communication is paramount. We are at a disadvantage for lack of the spoken dimension and body language. This page discusses teaching in general and online distributed education in particular.
Qualities of a Good Teacher
A good teacher is one who approaches students with kindness and good humor. Teachers have to lay down the rules of the course and the rules of class discussions, but if this is done well, a relationship of camaraderie can be established. Other teachers prefer to remain more formal and distant from their students, and this is sometimes necessary, especially when students try to get their professors to solve their personal problems and use office hours like a confessional. Being too friendly can sometimes invite such problems. On the other hand, if a student has serious emotional or family problems, a teacher who is too aloof might miss warning signs that could lead to a student's failure in their course work, or even more serious problems. We cannot offer psychiatric counselling and faculty must be careful to balance compassion with the legal need to urge a student in trouble to seek professional help face-to-face.
Possessing wisdom is not necessarily a prerequisite to being a good teacher, but loving wisdom and actively courting her is. Philo-Sophia, love of Sophia, is the root of philosophy. Instructors also need the skills of organization and flexibility. Our job is to organize our knowledge, to build a structure of knowledge and ask the right questions. We are passing on knowledge and techniques, but at the same time, we are also trying to aid our students in their own sacred quest, their own unique inner work. They will not follow quite the same path or take on our personalities and we shouldn't expect them to. Our goal is to teach students how to think for themselves and engage the subject matter we teach, whether it is music, history, or inner contemplative work.
One important quality for Avalon instructors is the ability to gracefully admit that one is wrong, or that one simply doesn't know the answers. If you don't know the answer to a student's question, turn it back on the student and seek an answer together. Ignorance and uncertainty offer an opportunity for research. We wish to encourage our students to challenge their assumptions and their cognitive frameworks. At the same time, teachers must be prepared to have their own assumptions challenged and be able to consider that students will almost always teach their teacher something new.
We should, as teachers, never cultivate an "Us versus Them" mentality towards our students. We are all learners and our students may even have more knowledge about the subject in some ways than we do. That situation should be viewed as an opportunity to let students contribute their own expertise and experience. In graduate level courses the students often can be seen as colleagues engaged in a kind of roundtable discussion, with the professor merely acting as a facilitator. In the Awenydd program, although courses are aimed at creating a solid foundation of knowledge and skills, our students should still be treated as colleagues and adults with a wealth of experience to share.
This said, however, the instructor's duty includes not only structuring the knowledge and work of the course, leading discussions and aiding the students in their explorations of the subject matter, but also evaluating student work. This means we must expect our faculty to have the experience and understanding to determine the merits of student work and guide them to achieve true excellence. That means the ability to read carefully and give advice on writing and grammar, clarity, and academic style. It means knowing the facts well enough to tell when students have them right, and it means knowing ourselves well enough to deal with the subjective and emotional dimension of the grading process.
Avalon courses are likely to be fairly small. If enrollments do get large -- say up to twenty students in a course -- then small group work is a good plan. Dividing the large class into groups of four or five students will encourage the quieter ones to participate and overcome their shyness. Moodle, our online learning environment, allows instructors to divide large classes into groups so that students can work together, either on a research project, or on an answer to some study questions.
For smaller classes, working as a single group may be fine, but instructors should always work to draw out those students who hold back, and restrain those who tend to jump in and take over a discussion. One of the ground rules for class discussions on line should be that when the teacher calls on someone by name to answer a particular question, others should wait to respond and let the named person have a go. In Moodle forums, with discussions spread over a week's time, this may be hard to manage. It is important for instructors to tell students on which day or days to check in on the classroom to keep the discussion going.
Avalon requires narrative evaluations in addition to numerical grade points to be recorded on the student's permanent record. This method avoids the pitfalls of reducing a student's work and ideas to a single number. This process requires teachers to do a little more work at the end of term, but will also give our college a much more human face. In the end, we teachers are not setting ourselves up in judgment, but offering ourselves as leaders to facilitate each student's own excellence.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
--William Butler Yeats
The Cyber-Classroom
Until we assemble in a physical campus, most of our interactions will take place through the medium of the internet. To facilitate student-teacher interaction, ACDS uses Moodle, a comprehensive course management software package that integrates the presentation of lectures and handouts, classroom discussion forums, the submission of assignments. Moodle permits students to make online journal entries on our secure server and gives access to their journal only to their instructor. Moodle also integrates the process of grading assignments and calculating a course grade. We plan in the future to integrate the course management system with a system for submitting course grades and narrative evaluations for a student's academic record.
One of the difficulties of the cyber-campus is that students and instructors have to learn to use new technology if they are to hand in papers in PDF or RTF format, for example, or if creative assignments involving diagrams, painting, or drawing are required. Another potential difficulty in the distance-learning setting is cheating. Without face-to-face interaction, it is even harder than usual to gauge whether a student is doing his or her own work. However, there are also benefits to the online course environment, the chief of which is that students can come to us from all over the world without the expense of uprooting themselves from their homes. Similarly, we can bring together teachers from all over the world.
It is my fond hope that faculty and students will take the time to participate in "campus life" on our discussion board too and that it will become a lively place for learning and for friendship. The discussion board has areas for public discussion and areas for private faculty and board meetings. It is important that the Avalon Faculty actively contribute to the public forums as well as the private ones, to nuture this growing community.
Grades
Teachers at ACDS are given the option to offer their course in the numerical system of grades or on the P-N system. The numerical system is based on grade points of 0-4, where four represents the maximum credit possible. We do not expect our students to receive grades of zero if they are handing in all their work. A grade of 1 indicates work that is worthy of some credit but does not meet the full requirements of the course as laid out in the syllabus. Numerical grades should always be explained in the narrative evaluation submitted at the end of term for the student's record.
It must be our goal as a faculty to do everything we can to allow our students to get 4's in their courses, to excell and surprise us. However, that does not mean handing out 4's just to be nice. We would do a disservice to our students and their capacity for excellence if we did not make them earn their full marks. Some student will inevitably be unhappy with recieving 2's and 3's but it is important for teachers to stress constantly that these grades reflect work well done. A grade of 2 is intended to indicate that a student has completed all the requirements for the class in a satisfactory manner, even if the work did not rise to the level of "Brilliant" and "Astonishing". We might say that 2 is for Competent. A grade of 1 indicates that the work deserves some credit but does indicate that either a student was not trying very hard or there is some other learning difficulty that should be addressed.
P-N grading is simply Pass-No Pass. This option is sometimes preferred by teachers and students because it takes some of the performance pressure off. Students who are concerned about maintaining a high GPA (Grade Point Average) will sometimes branch out and take risks with a subject they might otherwise avoid, when they have the option to take the class P-N. No grade point is recorded and P-N courses are not included in the GPA. For this reason students are only permitted to take a maximum of one-third of their courses P-N.
Teachers at Avalon are encouraged to discuss grading standards with the Dean or the Chancellor and among their colleagues. They are also encouraged to work together to address particular students and their performance difficulties.
Finally, a note about giving Incompletes. We have tried to eliminate the need for Incompletes by permitting students to take up to one year from the term in which they enrolled to complete each module. After the one year deadline, students must re-enroll and pay tuition again for any module they have not successfully completed.
