PTSP Home

Communiqué

Dr. Barbara Swaby

The Future of Teacher Training

Naming Student Propositions

Principles of Good Teaching

Teaching Scholar Models Teaching Excellence: Dr. Barbara Swaby

Somewhat ironically, she turned from struggling with sight reading to excelling with reading. But when she discusses her background, a career in education seems almost to have been predestined.

Swaby grew up in Jamaica, where both her parents were school principals. "Thirty-seven years ago," she reminisces, "girls were nurses or teachers and boys were doctors." All of the eight children in her mothers family and the two in her fathers family had careers either in medicine or education. A brief internship in a hospital revealed her antipathy to needles. That left education. "In the Third World," Swaby notes, "if you're teaching, literacy is the issue." Fortunately, she also enjoys teaching literacy.

But her musical training wasn't a waste of time. When Swaby entered Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee, at age 15, she was the only person of color on the campus, and her piano teachers family became her adoptive family. Besides academics and practicing five hours a day, she had chores around the house. In describing her music teacher, whom she holds in the highest regard, Swaby uses adjectives like strict. Swaby proudly describes herself in the same terms today. She thinks of herself as rigorous and imagines her students see her as demanding, doctrinaire, and unyielding, but also fair. "The Golden Rule," she says, "is one of the infrastructural pieces of my life."

Some of Swaby's music lessons have proven applicable to her second career choice. "Most of my best analogies and the things I know most securely come from music pedagogy," she says. In illustration, she talks about the central value of modeling in education. "My music teacher would always say, Listen to this piece. And she'd play it -- model it -- so my music training was excellence based." Now, when Swaby leads training sessions for school teachers, "it's the gym and music teachers who best understand me. They understand the differences between immersion and modeling and practice and performance; they understand the necessary sequence of modeling, practicing, and performing."

In addition to her parents and music teachers, another important model was Dr. John Manning, Swaby's graduate school mentor at the University of Minnesota. Manning talks about two levels of teaching: the scientific (data, things one can test) and the artistic (the most important things in teaching, which have to do with how one teaches -- the passion piece of teaching). Swaby says she continually strives to fuse the two in her teaching. Her approach to the artistic aspect of teaching involves personal attention: "Individuals are going to learn from you if they can feel connection with you." In the next breath, however, she modestly dismisses any credit for her influence on students.

Swaby is most proud of her clinical work, of mentoring teachers in the classroom, because that's the time I see the fruits of my labor. "When I see an average student do an extraordinary thing that was planned, then I know what effect I have. That's the only thing that matters."

Swaby admits she wasn't always the effective teacher-model she is now. When she gave her first lecture at CU, the two-hour class began with 34 students in the room. At the end of the class, nine remained. "When I started teaching, I thought I had to make sure students had the information they needed and that students were accountable for their work." She soon learned that their motivational range is horrendously wide.

Now, when she opens the first class of a term, Swaby tells students that they won't be able to purchase texts until the end of the sixth week of the course. That's because it takes that long to prepare them to know enough to use the books. First she provides the infrastructure for their studies by giving them the vocabulary and conceptual framework to understand the course reading, to make it their own.

Teaching, in Swaby's view, is an overwhelming responsibility. When she says, "There's nothing more sacred and valuable -- except for parenting -- than teaching," her impassioned delivery tells you she's not mouthing a cliché. Her actions embody her attitude toward her profession: she has missed only two classes in her 20 years at CU.

I don't go into the classroom when I want fun -- I go on vacation. The class goal is incredibly important, she insists. Yet Swaby's ability to convey her passion for teaching makes her anything but a somber pedant. In fact, her dynamic classroom presence led communications colleague Pamela Shockley to recommend Swaby to the Mind Extension University, a worldwide instructional television network. Through courses that lead to a certificate program in early childhood education that Swaby delivers on videotape, she reaches students around the world. Her voice mail messages (which average 40 a day) may include calls from Canada, Africa, and Europe. Calls also come to her home phone -- sometimes at 2 a.m. A parent from the Marshall Islands even brought a child to Swaby in Colorado Springs. It really makes you see what the needs are.

If all this sounds like a lot to manage, on top of a family, don't talk to Swaby about balance. "You don't balance," she declares. "You just do the best you can. You make sure you do your best."

Swaby's passion for excellence in every aspect of her work and life seems to have its grounding in her understanding that she chose this career. She notes that academic life can be very demeaning if it alone defines you, because it's always pulling you down at your professional core. " but," she notes, "I still have a choice to teach." And she has a clear sense of who she is apart from the academy. "When I mentor people coming in, one of the first things I say is, Remain hooked into your core, or you'll get pulled under." Her CU and public school students constitute the core of Swaby's professional life and energize her. "I'm so fortunate -- I'm teaching students to teach children."

In the past couple decades, excellence has been bandied about in every context, from business to sports to higher education. Dr. Barbara Swaby illustrates how much hard work and dedication must lie behind the rhetoric of excellence for it to be more than a hollow slogan. "As a university professor," she explains, "you're dealing with really bright people, so you need to know your content. And, in my view, you have to have a very clear view of your expectations -- and you have to match them first. It's the modeling concept again." And it extends even to the issue of professional dress. Swaby says she has a dress code for her education students in clinical courses. If they're working with the public, they have a responsibility to look professional, she says. You can be sure she offers an excellent model.

In addition to knowing ones field, the second component of excellent teaching is knowing how to help students meet your expectations. That's where experience and research help. Swaby's work in school classrooms shows her what she needs to learn to teach her own students, "and that's why I read research," she explains. "I call myself a translator of research."

Swaby translates research in the public schools at least once a week. In practice, that might involve asking and showing, within a sixth-grade science classroom, Where does cognitive training fit here? At the same time, she conducts research by assessing and evaluating what happens in those classrooms.

On her role as a teaching scholar, Swaby says, "I feel this overpowering responsibility. It's not a feather in your cap, just this overwhelming responsibility to the students. My teaching is sacrosanct. I'm a teaching scholar because of them." Then she quotes Plato on teaching; "The noblest of all professions. . . . No question in my mind."

The Future of Teacher Training

When asked how she would like the training of future teachers to evolve, Dr. Barbara Swaby answers that there must be more emphasis on practical instruction, on doing not just knowing. I see more and more this whole thing we call education as moving more inside the school, so its like a lab. That approach is necessary, she believes, because children are so varied, that no one thing will meet their needs.

For student teachers, the model Swaby describes requires more emphasis on mastering the art of teaching so as to balance the science of education. When you teach a child, knowing content is secondary -- and you can't test that. Instead of memorizing content, teachers need to learn how to meet the needs that are there, by teaching individuals rather than a curriculum. It's much like a musician, who practices technical skills so she has the tools to learn any piece from any period: You develop a set of competencies that allow you to deal with the variety.

Fundamentals of Teaching:
Naming Student Propositions

Mimi Wesson, School of Law, Boulder Campus

When a student articulates any reasonably complex but debatable idea (e.g., One cannot be guilty of attempt to commit a crime unless one intends to cause every consequence that is an element of that crime), give the proposition the students name. In your own comments, call it the Morrison proposal or the Martinez theory or the Margolin position. (You'll never run out of these labels if you've read enough Robert Ludlum novels.) When another student disagrees, do the same: the Norwood counterargument or the Natwick challenge. If two students contribute to an idea's formation, I sometimes give it a hyphenated name (the Binder-Charles corollary). Pretty soon the students will start referring to the idea the same way.

I find this practice promotes better student comprehension and memory of the argument or idea, probably because it gives their memory a familiar face and name to connect to the abstraction. Most of the time, you can later reanimate a discussion of the idea simply by invoking it by its name. The students whose names are attached to the ideas come to feel they are part of an intellectual tradition, and that their ideas belong in that tradition. They also become local experts, other students accosting them after class to ask things like, What was that proposition of yours again? So the class members begin to teach and to learn from each other.

Then others, or so it seems to me, are motivated to contribute in class, in the hope of gaining the opportunity to have an idea named after them too. (If you are afraid they might acquire too elevated an idea of the originality or ownership of their contribution, you can occasionally use a phrase like the Chambliss theory, originally proposed, of course, by Oliver Wendell Holmes.)

This technique can also occasionally work to curb the overbearing student or classroom monopolist. I find its sometimes possible to free a student from his or her compulsion to say something about everything by assigning the student ownership of one idea, especially if I can contrive to refer to it (by the students name) from time to time.

On the whole I think this trivial little trick works like mad.

Fundamentals of Teaching:
Principles of Good Teaching

William Krantz, Chemical Engineering, Boulder Campus

1. Teaching is really 90% motivation and 10% education. You cannot begin to inform students of everything to be learned in a discipline. Hence, the important thing is to motivate students to want to delve further in the particular subjectto begin the process of educating themselves that will, hopefully, go on for the rest of their lives.

2. Teaching should be interactive. It should be an exchange between the teacher and the students. Good teachers must avoid giving the impression that they have all the answers and that they are sharing this wisdom with their students. Instead, the way to create a fertile environment for facilitating learning is to create the impression that the teacher and the students are traveling down the learning path together -- that the students are exploring the field of knowledge and the teacher is merely serving as a very interested guide for this process. In order to promote this feeling, I try to avoid the words "I" and "me" in my lectures; rather, I like to use "we" and "us" to convey the sincere feeling that we are working together to make this wonderful thing called education happen.

3. Educators in all fields need to avoid the fill the bucket approach to education. Being an educator in applied science and engineering, it is tempting to believe that my mission is to help students learn important facts about some particular subject such as heat transfer or thermodynamics. However, it is so important to motivate and to turn students on to the excitement of a subject and the wonder of human understanding. I believe it is essential to encourage students to be curious about a subject, to want to explore the field in more depth, to want to make contributions to the field simply because it is so interesting. One gauge of how much you are doing to motivate students is to assess how much of a lecture period you spend facing the students rather than facing the blackboard or screen while presenting factual material.

4. Good educators should be stimulating and entertaining. Students should look forward to attending lectures because they enjoy the experience of interacting with a teacher. The same techniques that work well for entertainers can, with some modification, work well for educators as well. Unfortunately, most educators, at least in higher education, get little if any training in how to facilitate dynamic learning techniques. I believe that if I don't have my students laughing a few times during every lecture, I have somehow failed in putting enough of myself into the class.

5. A good educator should go into every class prepared. At the same time, every lecture should come off as if it were spontaneous and unique. A good model here is a great musical performance, which is preceded by much preparation on the artists part; yet, listeners have the feeling that they are hearing a unique rendition of the music. Similarly, I believe that teaching is also an art -- an art that must be practiced and yet one that should be shared with ones students as a unique experience.

Program Director: Mary Ann Shea   360 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0360   Phone: (303) 492-4985   E-mail: MaryAnn.Shea@Colorado.EDU