Again, make sure that you really are asking an interpretive question, a question for which you expect
different answers. You'll have to teach your students that you're serious about listening. The first few times
you ask a question like this, they will busy themselves looking for your answer rather than coming up with
their own answers. Don’t give in. Be a facilitator for answers.

Summarizing Statements

A graduate professor of mine had a method that I've tried to emulate. When someone shared a thought
in class, she would summarize the point being made. Her summaries of my particular points were so
brilliant and articulate that I'd glow with pride at my "genius." Listening to her, I was inspired on to
further heights. This is what we need to do for our students—inspire and encourage their thinking, not
overwhelm them with ours.

Providing Options

Give your students, as much as possible, the option of choosing what to think about. No group is more
guilty than my fellow English teachers for pushing esoteric, off-the-wall subjects. Do not misunderstand me.
As a colleague put it, "Relevancy is over-rated." Often, she says, we use it as a gimmick to get students
interested. But problems directed to particular audiences—audiences other than you, the professor—and
those problems from their business or personal lives that they might work on, can bring to our classrooms
more of our students’ natural wit and common sense. Students do, after all, maneuver themselves through
very complex situations, most of the time successfully.

Conclusions

The ideas and skillful maneuverings that come out of my Business English course, as students grapple
with pertinent individual and career problems, teach me. My students deliver much more than I would
think to demand: in-depth feasibility reports for new businesses they are thinking of pursuing, detailed
analyses of office management difficulties that they are living through and experiencing, creative new
perspectives. | remember, in particular, one rough-hewn young man’s articulate and astute reading of a
difficult personnel problem—this from a guy whom one might have been tempted to write off at the
beginning of the term.

Given their heads, students use them. They can think. If you can tap into that ability, class will be more
fun and much more productive—for all of you. The teachers we remember most fondly are the ones who
got us to think.

It's hard work getting students to think. Almost as hard as thinking itself. But it’s worth it!

Joe Anthony
English Instructor

Reprinted with permission of LCC = Teaching, No. 1, March, 1987.

For further information, contact the author at Lexington Community College, Cooper Drive, Lexington, KY
40506-0235.

 

Suanne D. Roueche, Editor
October 23, 1987, Vol. IX, No. 23

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS Is a publication of the National institute for Staff and Organizational Development, EDB 348, The University of
Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, (512)471-7545. Subscriptions are avallable to nonconsortium members for $35 per year. Funding in
Part by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation. Issued weekly when classes are in session during fall and spring
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“ The University of Texas at Austin, 1987
Further duplication Is permitted only by MEMBER Institutions for thelr own personnel. ISSN 0199-106X