The Skillful Teacher

Visual or Oral Communication
My own teaching style is heavily oral, and it is a real struggle for me
to teach visually. This is why team teaching with a visually inclined
person is so helpful to me and to my students. When this is not pos-
sible and I am on my own, I try to use visual handouts, PowerPoint
presentations, video clips from films, video streaming from the Inter-
net, and cartoons. An oral teacher like me will tend to use lots of
stories and place great energy in selecting exactly the words she
wishes to use to explain complicated ideas. A visual colleague can
help by expressing these ideas graphically and by encouraging stu-
dents to provide their own visual depictions of central concepts. For
example, my writing partner and friend Stephen Preskill has exper-
imented with an exercise called “Drawing Discussion” (Brookfield
and Preskill, 2005, pp. 121–122) in which students depict their flow
of talk visually, either two dimensionally or through collages of pho-
tos, cloth scraps, and other textured materials.
As an oral teacher I will also assume that when I’ve said some-
thing that I consider to be important that students will hear it in
exactly the way I mean it and remember it clearly. I have been
burned on numerous occasions when this turned out not to be true.
I have given careful instructions for assignments in class, clearly (at
least to my mind) set test dates, and painstakingly explained the cri-
teria for judging A, B, or C papers, only for students to tell me later
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that I had never given them any of those messages. After having
had several conversations with advisees in which I thought clear
agreements had been reached, only to discover at a later date that
these were unremembered by those same students, I started to insist
that all my conversations with advisees be taped and that within a
week of the meeting the students concerned provide a typed sum-
mary of the agreements we made that were recorded on the tape. I
also make sure that important pieces of information are put in bold-
face in the course syllabus and then give students a graded test on
that syllabus early in the semester.