The Skillful Teacher

A Final Comment
As should be clear from this chapter, emotions are rampant in the
college classroom. Even if students appear calm, you can’t assume
from their demeanor that learning is being experienced by them in
bloodless, wholly rational, or exclusively cognitive ways. If you regu-
larly collect CIQ forms from students, it will soon be apparent which
learning activities are emotionally laden. In reporting back CIQ
responses, students’ emotional reactions and rhythms can be named
and presented as normal and predictable. Through this reporting back
process, students can be helped to realize that what they thought were
private anxieties are shared by those sitting next to them. Even if no
advice on how to deal with these anxieties is given, just knowing that
others share these is reassuring and calming.
Never to feel pain, or only to feel pleasure in the classroom, is a
wholly unrealistic expectation that experience is bound quickly to
upset. hooks (1994) has written about the bourgeois decorum that
many of us view as the emotional template for college classrooms,
and our fear that when emotions are displayed it is a sign that things
are, by definition, out of control. This chapter has argued that the
opposite is true—that teaching and learning are highly emotional
activities that bring forth strong responses and that to feel such emo-
tions is predictable and normal, a sign that you are alive and alert in
the classroom. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that if classrooms
are experienced as emotion-free zones of practice, then something
essential to the process of learning and teaching is missing.
Understanding and Responding to the Emotions of Learning
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6
A
s the twenty-first century dawned, prognosticators in higher
education predicted confidently that the digital era would see
a massive diminution of face-to-face teaching. It was assumed that
something as mundane as lecturing would be consigned to the
graveyard of pedagogic history and replaced by online teaching for-
mats geared to student convenience. The Internet was expected to
be the final nail in the coffin of uninterrupted, mind-numbing
teacher-talk delivered in a sleep-inducing monotone. Yet, for having
been declared dead, the corpse of lecture-based teaching shows
remarkable signs of life. Those who periodically read the last rites
on the method usually find themselves resuscitating it, much to
their surprise.
Lecturing can certainly be done abominably. But just because
something is done badly by some teachers in some classrooms does
not mean the method as a whole is inherently flawed. To think that
all lecturing is bad and that all attempts at discussion-based learning
are good is to exercise a myopic dualism as simplistic as the “Four Legs
Good, Two Legs Bad” mantra in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Lecturing can
certainly be abused and discussion can certainly be engaging and
enlightening, but in and of themselves neither are innately good nor
bad ways to teach. One of the traps that advocates of discussion meth-
ods often fall into is that of setting up a false dichotomy between lec-
turing and discussion. They give the impression that anyone who