Given that, without intervention, our tendency is to become isolated in our classrooms, meeting with a Teaching Circle at NERC during the past two semesters was gratifying and inspirational. The scripts provided by Simone and those working with her were helpful in structuring and directing our conversations. (Teaching Circle participants had been provided by the organizers with sequenced questions or scripts that might guide our meetings, moving us from discussion of our goals and policies into sharing more detailed descriptions of reading and writing assignments, and finally moving us to closure in discussing what we hoped that students would achieve by the semester’s end. The discussion at the end of the semester, revolving around the endpoint that students reached, or should have reached, differed remarkably from our first discussion concerning our objectives for the semester.) However, our meetings generated the most energy whenever we found our way into sharing ideas and texts that were closest to us or about which we were most excited. The more honest we could be (and this was pretty difficult since we were largely strangers to one another), the greater became the value of our discourse. It was clearly important to share our disappointments and frustrations as well as our triumphs. And although it was difficult to meet even three times this semester, I felt that meeting three times was inadequate since we might have generated all the more trust and therefore closer scrutiny of our teaching styles through meeting over an extended time. In fact, several issues that warrant further examination arose in our Circle, but further discussion of these issues among us may not be possible. This is a tension with which we’re all familiar.
An even more important aspect of the Teaching Circles, in my view, is that there is no obvious hierarchy in the meetings, since we all attend in order to think together about our practices and goals. Newer faculty as well as faculty who had been teaching at the College for long periods had much to talk about and offer one another. We were at our most egalitarian in these Circles, as support generated honesty, which generated engagement in teaching and in grassroots exchange and dissemination of ideas. I don’t think it would be wanton hyperbole to suggest that the experience provides a great model—or microcosm—of group ownership of an enterprise to which we’re all committed. And in view of the fact that faculty at the regional centers sometimes have a more fragmented experience of teaching, in that fewer opportunities exist to connect with other instructors and to attend Departmental meetings, the Teaching Circle was particularly valuable in enabling connection among us as peers and colleagues.
Readers interested in more about teaching circles might also read Sharon Eiferman's article Teaching Circles Provide Support, Develop Dialogue.
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2004