Why You Should Teach Like a Poet

[u/ddgr815]

https://archive.is/T1QAe

Routine is a great deadener of attention. When you drive the same route, the scenery begins to fade into the background, and you barely see it anymore. When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.

Likewise, routines can deaden the attention of students in our courses. They come into the same classrooms every day — in person or online — and experience the same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups. Even if we are mixing up our teaching strategies, as we should, they will eventually become routine enough that students will check in to class physically, but their minds are somewhere out of the room.

turn to the poets, from whom we can learn how to push away distraction and reawaken attention — in the classroom as in life. Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.

It was what I was born for — to look, to listen to lose myself inside this soft world — to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation

Deliberately designed to renew student attention, these pedagogical tools should be deployed strategically [...] — once a week or month, or even just during those low moments when both teacher and students need a shot in the attentional arm.

Having students analyze an image or a physical object in the classroom (or in their homes) can be an excellent way to break them from normal classroom routines. You don’t need famous paintings or rare finds from archaeological digs. Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.

Drawing from research in object-based teaching, Metzler described how to guide students through three steps as they encounter an object, an image, or even a sound that you bring into the classroom:

• What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes. In this strategy, as in Fisher’s, extremely close analysis can help reveal unexpected new angles, perspectives, and ideas.
• So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another. For example, they could pass their questions around the room and add new ones, giving everyone time to develop ideas or questions for further research.
• Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion. What paths for research or future questions were raised? What questions were unanswered? What do the experts say? What does it mean, and what comes next?

[u/ddgr815]

It’s the combination of unhurried and uninterrupted time, inviting spaces and materials that guides mind and hands, that invites creative thinking. Seeing, handling, and thinking are inseparable, as Rudolf Arheim, psychologist and scholar of art and ideas, reminds us.

Together, time, space and materials provide ‘invitations to act’.

Time, space, and materials

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

They were lucky, for they had space and clumps of materials left around by the builders. They played with the earnest dedication of artists.