I am not entirely sure when hacking became a good thing. Hacking computer software or systems used to be considered a nefarious endeavor. For the most part, it still seems to be – though there are a handful of people who seek to use this superpower for good. Comedians refer to people who recycle tired old jokes for cheap laughs as hacks. Computer programmers refer to slapdash code as hacks. Cats make disgusting noises when they hack-up hairballs. Hacking was generally a bad thing. Until recently. At some point it became a meme for a shortcut.
Advice for hacking all sorts of aspects of life is everywhere online – and in old school bookstores too. You can learn to hack most any endeavor. Well, not blacksmithing.
Or ballet dancing.
Or classical cello….
You know what, I am getting off track.
Google “hacks for ______” and someone probably has advice for doing ______ quickly and with minimal effort.
But…
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. – Robert Pirsig
Caring is what animates the very hard work of knowing. – Parker Palmer
<rant>
Here is the problem with advice about “hacking teaching” – or, generally, the whole asinine notion of “best practices” for teaching: what is best for one learner, given one particular teacher, in one context, for achieving one particular end is likely to be the opposite of helpful for other learners, and other teachers, in other contexts, or for achieving different ends. If you have been asking what are best practices for teaching, without specifying who your students are, what you are trying to teach, what your strengths and weaknesses are as a teacher, under what conditions you are teaching, under what conditions your students are meant to learn, what resources you and your students have available, what you and your students are hoping to achieve, etc., then you have been asking an incomplete question. So any answer you have found is globally wrong. Because it is incomplete. At best, such answers will only work for some students, some of the time, for achieving some outcomes. And, depending upon your particular strengths and weaknesses as a teacher, they may not work for you or your students at all. The notion of “best practices” is naively simplistic. And for that reason, the contemporary packaging of “hacks for teaching” results in a profusion of hacks at teaching.
My students have heard rants like this from me before – usually when I am talking about issues of equity (the people for whom so called “best practices” work are the same people who are always privileged in our educational systems, because they are the reference group invoked in all normative discourse) or educational philosophy (because different philosophical traditions emerge from very different orientations with respect to the worthy aims of education, and those are the ideological assumptions that are freighted in with any so called “best practice”) – but my current provocation to pontification is to do with the kinds of questions and concerns I am seeing colleagues across higher education asking as they struggle to rework their courses in light of COVID-19.
To be sure, this is hard. We are all struggling to make our classes work to provide safe learning environments without compromising (too much) effectiveness. But when I see questions like ‘I have been assigned a twice-weekly, 90 minute lecture schedule, but someone told me I shouldn’t lecture that long, so what should I do instead?’ (that is, nearly verbatim, a question I saw on an online forum the other day), it frustrates me. Not because it is a bad question (it is true that lecturing that long is wildly ineffective for fostering learning – even in the best of circumstances), but because it is the question of someone having to really think about their approach to teaching for the first time (the person who posed it indicated it was not a new course, just a different schedule). Those of us who understand teaching and learning are not asking such basic questions. We are wrestling with logistics, determining the availability of resources, finding time to adjust or convert content to leverage (or, at least, work with) new modalities, the constantly shifting guidance and plans from leadership, etc. We are feeling clumsy as we figure out how to use different modalities from what we are comfortable with. But we are not paralyzed by being barred from the singular trick some hack enthusiast taught us to do with our pony.
Perhaps that seems like a harsh reaction to someone who is struggling in a genuinely difficult situation. It’s not that I want those folks to fail. I am willing to help – and to do so by meeting them where they are (I am a teacher, after all). But let’s be honest about what is really going on here. The prevailing, implicit assumption in higher ed has long been that, if one understands the content, any idiot can teach it. And now that everyone on campus has no choice but to reflect on how they will teach their content in an unfamiliar context, it has become clear that idiocy doesn’t work. Teaching is not so easy. It doesn’t matter how well you (as the teacher) know the content if you can’t figure out how to communicate it to your students.
Here is the dirty little secret though: if you have not thought about this stuff before, then you weren’t communicating your content to your students in the before times either – not most of them anyway. That is why the same kinds of people keep succeeding. They are not smarter or more disciplined. They just have the privilege of being the only ones to whom you have been communicating.
COVID has brought this issue into sharp relief: too few college and university faculty members have thought about their teaching beyond recommendations of so called “best practices”. The hope to be found here is that the difficulty of teaching while COVIDing could be an opportunity for a broader conversation about good teaching. It could interrupt toxic assumptions about teaching being easy or students’ failure as purely their own fault. But… is anyone asking those sorts of questions? Most of the discussion I keep seeing (explicitly in the discourses of faculty or implicitly the kinds of resources offered by administration and IT services) remain naively simplistic ones about “best” practices for working in whatever environment (real or virtual) the institution has prescribed. We are approaching this crisis by trying to simply hack the new environment. And those hacks are going to suck. They do suck.
There are too many teaching hacks in higher education. And, to be clear, what I mean by that is what too many higher ed instructors do, by way of teaching, is hack-y. In the old, bad sense. For all of the teaching hacks out there: stop thinking that your students fail because your subject is difficult. The truth is that teaching effectively is difficult. And if you are just doing what was done to you – or what someone told you is the best thing to do, during that professional development session you attended in order to get free lunch – you are doing it poorly. That is why your students are not succeeding. It’s not the subject. It’s you.
</rant>
Here are a few resources for anyone looking for accessible guidance about teaching (especially in higher ed). These provide some good practical suggestions (i.e., what to do), but pay attention to the theoretical underpinnings (i.e., why to do it) as well. (You are scholars, yes?) No contemporary scholar has studied or practiced in the midst of a global pandemic before, so you will not find guidance for exactly what to do in response to the current crisis anywhere. However, understanding the theoretical underpinnings will position you to make reasoned decisions about how you will approach teaching your subject to your students in your situation. This list just begins to scratch the surface. If, after reading these, you find yourself hungry to learn more about teaching and learning, let’s talk.
Parker Palmer: The Courage to Teach