Notes on Trust

Brookfield reading says that teachers need to build trust with students, and that involves two components: credibility and authenticity.

Credibility: present yourself as someone who has something to offer students

Authenticity: present yourself as a human being with emotions and frailties.

8 processes described for building trust:

  1. Don’t deny your credibility (don’t belittle your experience)
  2. Be explicit about your organizing vision (you have a plan; not everything goes)
  3. Make words and actions congruent (practice what you preach)
  4. Be ready to admit errors (but not before establishing credibility)
  5. Reveal aspects of yourself unrelated to the content (but only enthusiasms, nothing that you might want to say to a therapist)
  6. Show that you take students seriously (listen, encourage longer responses by waiting, refer to previous comments,)
  7. Don’t play favorites
  8. Realize the power of your own role modeling (What we do as teachers is invested with enormous symbolic significance by students)
Activity: Work in groups of 2 to 3 to discuss and make selections (the hardest, the most important). When finished with decisions, come up to board and mark:

H for hardest to achieve

I for most important

S and your name for one for which you have a story to share

The reading was published in 1990. In this day and age we need to also address a couple of other issues which apply to teachers in every classroom:

Preventing Sexual Harrassment Training is required for instructors and graduate students at Rice.

FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) training from the General Counsel’s Office (required for instructors at Rice).

Notes on Questioning

Our reading presented Two hierarchies of thought for categorizing questions:

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation

and the Three-Story Intellect Method: Gathering, Processing, Application.

Seven teacher behaviors associated with asking effective questions:

  1. asking a question, pausing 3-5 seconds, then calling on a student;
  2. redirecting the same question to several students;
  3. calling for answers from both volunteers and non-volunteers;
  4. framing questions that call for longer responses, such as “What should we do next?” (many answers) rather than “Do you understand?” (yes/no answer);
  5. not repeating a question;
  6. not answering the teacher’s own question;
  7. not repeating student answers.
Activity: Break into groups of 3 to 4. Individually compose 3 questions related to your STC subject that speak to each of the 3-story categories. Share these questions with your group and have them determine the category and/or adjust/improve/sharpen the question to better address its target category.

Homework: Second Draft of Course Proposal Due Feb 4. Readings: everybody read "Opening and Closing." In additon those with last names starting in A-L read Craft and those starting in M-Z read Dweck.