Trusting . . .and the power of indirect teaching

Dear Blog, we are completing our sixth week of instruction. Workshops are centering on constructing an annotated webliography of a limited number of sources, one required article to be retrieved from the Reynolds' Database collection. Students are peer critiquing in the Blackboard group space (File Exchange) and the Group Discussion Board. This seventh week students are summarizing sources using a mapping process (borrowed from effective reading techniques) and inserting in-text citations. Thus one file that the student and instructor exchange as an attachment to email is developed with each exchange.

Pictured (to the left) is Tresa, our most talented student in this Learning Community section of English 111 (teamed up with a Computer Concepts course). Tresa has been a home school mother/teacher. She instituted social programs for homeschoolers and is focusing on this theme for her first essay. Next to her is Sally, her scribe, who keeps her posted on the lecture she cannot hear.

Although we are into our seventh week, I am feeling for the first time that students are trusting me. Nothing else will hold our class together but trust: trust that I'm teaching on target to address their academic needs, trust that I will support and teach them, and teach them, and teach them; trust that I will not abandon them. How have I observed and assessed this trusting? I see that attendance in each class is high; that students are sending starts and stops of the assignment so that I can return timely feedback. One key to establishing trust, I have discovered, is the one-to-one mini-conferences (Donald Murray gone electronic) held during class time and conference hours before class. The student and instructor review the draft in process on the screen. The instructor asks questions for clarification, comments, makes notes. The updated file is returned to the student by attachment to email for continued development.

The key to the success of these one to ones is that each conference is overheard by the other students. They see how the instructor is behaving. They observe the affect of the student, their peer. Most important, they overhear the instruction. Overhearing or indirect teaching is a powerful and effective pedagogic tool. Think about it, don't we learn by observation and overhearing more effectively that by direct teaching? That is to say, in an informal setting, we become active learners by our own choice; our conscious choices lead us to select out and focus on what we target as important to us, what we really want to know. I mentioned this observation of mine to a signer for a deaf student some years back. She became really excited at the notion: "Yes, yes, that is why the deaf miss out on so much. They only understand what is specifically addressed to them, but they miss out on so much that is being communicated around them."