6.4  Summary

Communicating in the classroom is not about teaching: It is about facilitating student learning. In other words, it is about helping students develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes with respect to the material to be learned. To this end, students must be active: Rather than listening and watching, they must be speaking and doing. Your role as an instructor is to define learning outcomes, design and run learning activities that will help students achieve these outcomes, and evaluate your performance by assessing outcomes and students' satisfaction.

First, define the learning outcomes for your sessions. Instead of merely identifying the material to be covered, identify the capacity that students must develop with respect to this material in the form of a sentence starting with "By the end of the session/course, the students should be able to . . . " and continuing with a verb and object expressing a specific, observable action. Define outcomes as a hierarchy: overall outcomes for the course, specific outcomes for each session, etc.

Next, design learning activities that allow students to achieve the learning outcomes. Usually, the activity is directly suggested by the outcome: Have students try their hand at the capacity they are supposed to develop. The challenge is to design a sequence of activities that has an appropriate level of difficulty, that provides the required feedback, and that students can relate to. To learn, students need to believe that achieving the outcomes is possible and desirable, and they need to know how they are doing. Organize your activities into a plan for your session.

As you run your activities during a session, focus on catalyzing students' activity. Besides welcoming students' questions, ask them questions yourself to guide their thinking processes. Make them say and do activities themselves as much as possible, including answering one another's questions. To lower the barriers and increase the opportunities to participate, consider having students work in subgroups. To succeed, you must mean it (and show to the students that you mean it): Your role is to ensure that everything that needs to be said and done will be said and done, but as little as possible of it by yourself. You are in charge of the process, not (or not only) the material.

To ensure that students are usefully active, you must first create a favorable atmosphere. In a sense, you must start by creating a group. You can do so by ensuring that every student has a place in the group, both physically and verbally. Physically, arrange the room and the students so nobody is left out. Verbally, have students speak as soon as possible, for example at the occasion of a round of introductions. Eliminate other unknowns, too: clarify the learning objectives, the planning of the sessions, etc.

At all times, evaluate your performance so you can improve what needs to be improved. After an activity or a session, informally assess the outcomes by listening to and observing students. At the end of the course, formally assess the outcomes with an exam that adequately tests the capacities students have acquired. Besides these objective assessments of your performance as an instructor, you can subjectively evaluate it by asking students for feedback, either orally or in writing.