Assessing the Seminar

I'm teaching a graduate course for the first time this semester, and to call it merely a learning experience would be a gross understatement. I was working primarily from my own experience as a student in the graduate classroom, (experience that is now five or six years old at the back end), and some scattered advice from colleagues, my advisor, and from the blogosophere. That was all helpful to be sure, but I couldn't really apply it many concrete, or at least confident ways, until I actually set foot in the classroom.

I've learned some lessons:

• The space matters: a bad classroom set-up can totally change the dynamic of the classroom, and after the first two spaces (there was an unofficial room change, and then an official one), I ended up in a room with a seminar table, and while it is by no means a perfect space, it is a familiar one for me.

• Good discussion needs to be taught: I was really flummoxed early on by what I initially believed was a lack of ambition in the class. A few folks recommended structuring exercises--the occasional groupwork, a bit of lecture here and there, guided questions and discussion as opposed to the more free-form discussion I had hoped for--and those helped early on. This past week, I wanted tot test how well these structures had been teaching discussion, and not just serving as a crutch...for two texts that I have a fair amount of expertise on, I announced that I was going to sit back and listen as much as I could. I tried to interject to keep the discussion rolling with discussion questions, and stopped to give a bit of a primer on some relevant theoretical models (Sedgwick, Butler), but by and large, I left the actual work of criticism up to the class. And while I had to bite my tongue a lot (I REALLY like to talk about books and plays), things kept rolling at a good pace, most of the major ideas and issues were hit upon, and most were handled with a modicum of sophistication, and more people than usual spoke more than usual. It was good.

• That midstream feedback from the class is as important in the grad class as it is in the undergraduate classroom: I did a midterm eval exercise around week five, and got some really excellent suggestions for tweaking the class, including providing more background context (I figured it was not as necessary for a class that focused on lit from the past sixty years, but it was, and I myself needed to brush up on some of it). It also gave the class a sense of ownership over what was going on there, and I think that this moment was important for spurring on their own incentive to step up their participation.

• At first I thought that good syllabus design was no more than half of a good course. Now I think that good syllabus design is fully half of a good course. I took some advice to not overload the reading to heart, and I actually think I lowballed the amount of reading. Maybe not, but there are a lot of things that I'll make sure I'm doing on the syllabus design for future classes: Including more and denser theory that I sort half-expected that people would know; thinking a bit more closely about subject-matter coherence (as opposed to simply using a survey approach to a nonetheless focused period and genre); building in structures that will rely less on discussion early on, but build toward it, etc.

It's the comparative paucity of theory that I'm most worried about in terms of what students will leave the course missing (and that may come up on evals, too, which are taken very seriously around here). And as I begin to think about which course I'd like to teach in the future, figuring out which topics will allow for the most appropriate level of theory must be a factor.

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