Nancy MacLean
History Department
Northwestern University

In this essay I want to describe what I think makes my teaching work--when it does. And that is, as my title puts it, making connections--with students, among students, and between what students bring to my classes and what they encounter there. Deliberately cultivating these relationships--among people and ideas--is the heart of what I do in my teaching. My concern is with both intellectual content and classroom dynamics because in my experience success for large numbers of students in either area presupposes the other.

My remarks here offer no new approaches, no strategies for honing important skills, and not even any fun gimmicks to experiment with. Instead, I will make a case for this simple proposition that will probably strike most readers as exceedingly obvious (although I hope to show that there's more to it than meets the eye): effective teaching--for me, at least--depends on making connections, above all on building relationships with and among students that help to create a genuine sense of community and collaboration in the classroom.

As I was preparing to write this essay, I began to feel somewhat sheepish about my rather unsophisticated thesis, so I went to the library of my university's Center for Teaching Excellence in order to dress up my core idea a little. I found there some helpful ideas, but I also found that many writings in the so-called "learning sciences" turned me off: the authors sometimes seemed to purposely rely on lifeless language and contrived experiments, as though eliminating all trace of actual young people from the discussion would somehow boost the prestige of teaching.

Detecting some status anxiety in this so-called "learning sciences" literature, I remembered a wonderful article that my colleague Mike Sherry wrote for an audience of American historians a few years ago. The piece's title encapsulated its analysis and moral: "We Value Teaching despite--and because of--Its Low Status." Teaching, Mike observed, is "the activity that cannot be named" in the professoriate. Reporting on a large national survey of American historians, he tried to make sense of the paradox that "many historians find primary satisfaction in teaching . . . despite the low value placed on it in our profession's systems of training, scholarship, and status." Mike was right about the sometimes inverse relationship between value and prestige.

Helping young people to grow is just not something one does in the belief that the people on the top of the status hierarchy and the financial reward system are ever going to regard it as highly as they do other things. A case in point: the federal government's Dictionary of Occupational Titles, which describes and rates the complexity of thousands of different job titles, not so long ago gave child care attendant the same rating as parking lot attendant.¹ We do this work not for its present or potential status but because it matters--to us, and to our students. (I say all this as a way of working up to the confession that the literature about teaching that I found most exciting, absorbing, and resonant was that on elementary schools).

What I'd like to think out loud about today is, in a sense, what's happening when things go right. We all know what a "good" class feels like: students are excited, leaning forward, and all pushing to get into the discussion; the discussion becomes cumulative as students refer back to each others' earlier points, whether to amplify on or differentiate from them; there is both laughter and passion in their talk; we find ourselves invigorated not only by their energy, but also by how they saw things in our materials that we didn't even know were there. This, I submit, is connection and collaboration at its best: we're all working, we're all learning, we're all engaged. Now, this is hardly a way of thinking about teaching that I invented; my own discovery of these principles is a case of the Christopher Columbus syndrome. From John Dewey to Paulo Freire and beyond, educators have been talking about these ideas. But periodically, people like me have to rediscover them so as to replenish our tool kits. Which is why I started reading in preparation for this essay.

One of the most stimulating things I came across was a book by the Deborah Meier, the principal of the much-publicized Central Park East school in New York. Called The Power of their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem, it offers a good introduction to the ideas and practices that turned a failing school into a highly successful one. But what I found most striking was how applicable the discussion of learning in an elementary school situation is to higher education. "A good school for anyone," as Meier says, "is a little like kindergarten and a little like a good post-graduate program--the two ends of the educational spectrum, at which we understand that we cannot treat any two human beings identically, but must take into account their special interests and styles even as we hold all to high and rigorous standards."² Having shrunk the school down to a manageable size, where collaborative human relationships were possible among staff and students, the Central Park East staff posed as one of their central tasks a shift away from the tradition of "teaching as telling" to a model of "teacher as coach." Meier makes clear, however, that for teachers to embrace such a model and for it to work, other things about the school setting must change as well. At this school, for example, teachers became much less isolated and private about their teaching and more collaborative and public, regularly engaging in discussions and critical evaluations of their own teaching practice.

In this approach to integrated learning, Central Park East emphasizes five key "intellectual habits" for its students, which happen to be precisely those that many of us seek to cultivate in our classes. Pushed across disciplines, and in school and out, these are: "concern for evidence (how do you know that?), viewpoint (who said it and why?), cause and effect (what led to it, what else happened), hypothesizing (what if, supposing that)," and finally and most critically, "who cares?"³ Without changes in the way teaching and learning take place, it's hard for students to make a habit of thinking in these terms. Because, essentially, what's being asked from them is intellectual independence, which is hard to acquire except through regular exercise. The model of teaching as coaching is more conducive to this than to the model of teaching as telling. I push the point here because the idea of teaching as coaching is a key example of my theme of making connections. Not only is the learning active rather than passive in this model, but also a coach needs some connection with--some understanding of--an athlete to coax out her best performance and push her on to long-term development.

Another innovative and influential school reformer, the Yale-based psychiatrist and educator James Comer, has come at this point in a different way. Comer, whose model is in operation in many city schools today, points to the unprecedented stimulation and pressures facing kids today and their comparative lack of preparation for handling them, a gap that leaves schools faced with all kinds of problems of personal development, interpersonal relationships, and intergroup conflicts--before they can even get to academic matters. "As we reviewed our program activities and the results," said Comer, "time and again a single factor emerged: social skill development was directly correlated with improved behavior and academic achievement."⁴ Much of what he has to say is specific to younger kids and to city schools, but there is a core understanding there that I find incredibly helpful. And that is that students are whole human beings, with complex lives, demands and influences working on them that have nothing to do with our courses--and yet that sit with them in our classrooms and hover over them as they work on our assignments.

Being alert to this--to the developmental and life challenges students are facing--has meant that I can be a better teacher. This applies not just in the dramatic cases of students who have suffered family crisis or personal trauma of one kind or another. All of our students are wrestling with career choices, peer relationships, encounters with racism or struggles with their own biases, experiments with romance and sex, issues of separation from family and home communities, and so on. I'm not suggesting that we dive into all this with them and turn our classrooms into therapeutic forums; that would be a nightmare. What I am saying is that being attuned to this background noise, as it were, can help us to make sense of their sometimes erratic performance. And sometimes our material can offer a welcome distraction and escape from it all--or even suggest new directions they might take. I have found that being open to these signals not only helps me to be a resource to a student who needs a sounding board, but also makes my teaching more rewarding: since these are among the rare and wonderful occasions when you learn that your course has actually affected someone's life.

So how can we apply this kind of learning philosophy to our classes? Here, I draw on one of the recommendations from Ken Bain, the Director of Northwestern's Searle Center for Teaching Excellence: Kenneth Bruffee's Collaborative Learning, a stimulating book aimed at college and university teachers. Bruffee begins from the premise, grounded in today's work-world, that "effective interdependence . . . may be the most important lesson students should be asked to learn." Yet they cannot build this skill in most courses, which are still taught in the conventional teaching-as-telling way. Bruffee goes on to offer strategies of change based on the model of small group collaborative work.

In the process, he makes some important points about what knowledge is, how it develops, and how we can advance these processes in our teaching styles. Rather than take knowledge to be simply "an entity that we transfer from one head to another," Bruffee argues for a different model: "Collaborative learning assumes instead that knowledge is a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers--something people construct by talking together and reaching agreement."⁵ This is something that almost all of us take for granted in our scholarship--yet the implications of which we often fail to apply to our teaching. What's exciting to me about this model is the way it re-frames what we do in such a way as to make clearer what our core task is.

We are, in effect, inviting our students to join new "knowledge communities" run by different principles than the ones to which they now belong; our task, then, is a "reacculturative" one. This will happen most easily, most effectively, and most lastingly, not when we are the center of attention, but rather when we work indirectly to create the conditions--the work groups and the tasks--that enable students to work out issues with each other. Conversing together on a common problem, they begin to make the discipline's norms their own in the course of negotiating what they think they know. What we need, urges Bruffee, is "structured conversation among students";⁶ the aim of this conversation, of this "translation community" as he evocatively puts it, is to help the students become "fluent" in the language of the knowledge community that is our discipline or field. While in this translation community, students are leaving behind their other languages and developing their facility with ours.⁷ I really like this idea. When my classes work well, this is exactly what happens: students start to teach each other.

My own teaching practice incorporates these principles in a variety of ways--most very simple, even pedestrian. But they work. First off, I seek to break down the sense that we're all strangers by paying a lot of attention to classroom dynamics. I make sure to learn students' names within the first 2-3 weeks. (This is critical, and worth it no matter how many gimmicks it takes to do). I have been amazed again and again (even saddened) at how much difference this simple gesture makes to my students--at how much more engaged they, in turn, become. Then, in seminars and sections, I try to get them to learn and to use each others' names, by having them put out name cards in the first weeks of class and urging everyone to refer to each other by name. This is not silly: if the project is to create a community of mutual respect, trust, and engagement, it just won't work in a roomful of atomized and alienated strangers. For this reason, too, I push my office hours hard; I let them know that I need to know them to do my part well, and for the course as a whole to work. Sometimes I do it so plaintively that some students laugh in embarrassment--but that's alright, because I've modeled something in the process: not being afraid to admit a need for help, for interaction. And that makes it easier for them to do the same.

Let me give you a counterexample, to illustrate how learning can be blocked by the failure to develop human connections. In my first year at Northwestern, a student from my lecture class came to visit in office hours. After we had talked for awhile, she said, "You're so different from lots of the other professors I've had here." "What do you mean?," I asked, perking up at the prospect of flattery. I can't say I felt honored by her answer, but I'll never forget it: "You listen; you're interested. So many of them don't want to talk to you at all. I went to see one prof," she said, "and he wouldn't even look at me--kept looking away, at his books, like I wasn't even there." Try to imagine this instructor's classroom. Try to imagine yourself as a student learning in it. Someone who doesn't even care enough about you to establish eye contact is not likely to set you on fire about his subject. Each of us in the room can probably prove the converse if we think about the teachers who had a significant impact upon our development: they were uniformly people--I'd guess--who took a real interest in us as individuals. They likely conveyed that concern in the way they listened to us and in how they talked to us about our work and our lives.

Another, more substantive and content-based strategy for developing that community is to do some kind of work in small groups, beginning in the first or second week of a section or seminar. They might, for example, start by identifying the thesis of an article and its strongest supporting evidence, or by analyzing a primary document. I try to devise assignments that develop skills sequentially in a given class and over the quarter as a whole, from the easier to the most difficult, so that students can acquire both the necessary tools and a sense of achievement before embarking on the hardest work. Also, the group dynamics seem to work best when they tackle tasks that are progressively more challenging. Questions might begin with, in the words of one teacher who works in a similar way, "what do you see?"; they then move on to "what does it mean?"--from the descriptive, in other words, to the analytical and interpretive.⁸ In all these settings, I try to encourage student-to-student intellectual engagement wherever possible--not only in discussions but also in interactive lectures. In my experience, the more they take each other's ideas seriously, the more they will take their own ideas seriously; the more they learn to listen, the more they learn to think.

Let me give you an example from my women's history course. I once set up the sections to debate the proposition that nineteenth-century American women benefitted from the so-called cult of domesticity. The idea was two-fold: in content, to get students thinking about matters of interpretation in more complex ways than they were used to--to get them to read against the grain of their own inclinations. In process, I wanted to encourage substantive interaction among them and get them used to making and defending arguments. As it happened, one student reported that her parents, who had visited class that day, debated the issue for almost the whole car ride home to Michigan. Another student told me, after the course was over, she and several of her friends in the course kept arguing about the issue for the next week. So in this exercise, both the substantive material and the format worked together to create the desired effect: students took each other seriously and made the ideas matter. The challenge in any given class is to figure out how to give them a stake that makes them care.

Now, while trying to foster interaction and collaboration, I also try to keep a focus on individual development. That might mean noticing who is hanging back and looking skeptical, and finding ways to pull them in and get them to articulate their doubts or disagreements. It might mean giving special reinforcement, during class or after, to a shy student who hesitantly offered an idea. But it always means, at minimum, giving feedback that recognizes achievement as well as areas for improvement. One study of learning puts the project well: "Connected teachers," the authors observe, "try to discern the truth inside the students."⁹ To try to discern the truth inside the students--in my reading, this phrase means searching for that element (even if it is only a flicker) that is strong and can be built on, and then helping them to see how. I start all my comments on papers or exams with something positive or encouraging (even if I have to really dig to find it). Not because I believe in so-called coddling, but because I understand motivation--most notably, my own. When I hear nothing but criticism, I feel like effort is futile and I shut down. But when I get, say, a reader's report that says this and this are really interesting (although they need more development), but this and this are off, then I'm ready to get to work. It's the same for students.

Students need to feel that we believe in them--that we believe that they can do what we're asking of them--in order to push themselves to perform at the edge of their capacity. If all they hear is disapproval, which makes them feel inadequate and deficient, why bother? Hopefulness, as a fascinating science story in the New York Times reported a few years ago, is itself a more reliable predictor of success in students than any of those measures we usually look towards.¹⁰ To the extent that that research is sound, the more hopeful we can make our students about their prospects for growth, the more we're likely to see.

In this regard, I learned a lot from teaching the department's senior thesis seminar: there you really experience the cumulative pedagogical power of supportive, engaged critique. Students literally transform their work--and their thinking--through this relationship. We can make this happen in other ways outside the honors seminars. One colleague of mine, Tim Breen, for example, routinely has students rewrite each of three papers they do for his lecture class on colonial history. I can't say I've been that ambitious yet, but I do give students the option of re-writing for extra-credit rather than a change of grade. If we think about the dynamics in this situation of revising, what we're doing is developing a collaboration--a conversation--around the student's work. It's a great example in action of the kind of relationship I'm promoting today.

Now, so far, I've said a lot about process, but not so much about content, partly because here it's harder to cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet here, too, in subject matter, making connections makes for effective teaching, in my experience--particularly on the all-important motivating question of why the knowledge matters. On the first day of all of my courses, but especially the lecture courses, I devote some time to the promised "payoff," connecting course themes or required skills to issues or interests likely to be on their minds. Some people might find this crude; I don't. Or rather, I don't care if it is: we're all too busy these days to show interest in something if we can't see why it might matter. The connection may be indirect, or even tenuous, but it really helps to seek it out and identify it for them.¹¹

Along the way, I look out for other opportunities to make such connections--to show how the history we're learning matters to their understanding of the world, and how the skills that we're developing can help them in that project. A case in point: in my women's history class last quarter, someone commented in lecture that something reminded her of The Rules. "The what?," I said. "The Rules," she repeated--and by this time many heads were nodding in agreement. My impromptu poll showed that I was among the maybe 15% of the room who'd never heard of this phenomenon. The students quickly brought me up to speed, and by the end of the week a student had given me an extra copy she had of this manual. Bearing the subtitle, Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, the book sports an engagement ring for a cover design. A quick read showed me that it was quite as awful as some said it was--but it was awful in some interesting ways, and it nicely complemented the last unit of the course. So I assigned sections of it to accompany the reading on the syllabus. And it became one of the options on the final take-home essay menu: to provide a historical analysis of this document, drawing on as many course materials as possible, that situated and made sense of it in historical context. Some of the essays that came in were outstanding--and so original that they illustrated, for me, the value of reaching for this kind of connection.

What I've tried to do is lay out some ideas that I found interesting and some practices that worked for me. Most of them might well already be second-nature to you. But my aim was not originality. It was to name and pull together some principles of teaching that are so fundamental, to many so obvious, that they are rarely discussed--and therefore easily forgotten when so many other claims are pressing in upon us and demanding our attention. But making connections so as to develop the relationships that sustain learning is fundamental; it's something worth reflecting on as we go about our work and worth discussing when we get together. And it is so precisely because most of the institutional pressures we face push in the other direction: in effect, they push us to think about paper rather than people. Our scholarship draws us into debate with other texts, and our teaching often seems to revolve around absorbing, generating, and assessing written material. Given all this, it's okay to remind ourselves from time to time that we are actually trying to reach and influence eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year olds.

And there is an intrinsic payoff to this that occurred to me as I was working on this essay: teaching is the one area of our professional lives free of footnotes and the compulsion to create them. In teaching, we can lift each others' ideas freely and apply them imaginatively however we choose. We don't have to say to our students that I'm making eye contact with you now because my first workshop on teaching said this was good; or I'm walking away from the podium now and moving around the room because I read that I should; or I'm speaking without a microphone because once after I gave a truly horrid public talk my actor-friend kindly pulled me aside and taught me the secret of projection. No, we can just appropriate whatever ideas or tools we need and incorporate them as we see fit without needing to acknowledge anyone but those in the room with us. And that may be as close to academic freedom as we'll ever come.

1. Louise Kapp Howe, Pink Collar Workers: Inside the World of Women's Work (New Yok: Avon, 1978), 238.
   
2. Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 48-49.
   
3. Meier, 41.
   
4. James Comer, School Power: Implications of an Intervention Project (19980; reprint New York: Free Press, 1993), 190, also 28.
   
5. Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3.
   
6. Brufee, 4, 9.
   
7. Bruffee, 75.
   
8. Peter J. Frederick, "Student Involvement in Large Classes," 54.
   
9. Mary Field Belenky, et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (1986; reprint New York: Basic Books, 1997), 223. I cite this work with some apprehension, because of its unexamined gender essentialism and deeply problematic and probably fallacious claims that female students are averse to argument and debate. Nonetheless, some aspects of its discussion of "connected learning" and good teaching apply to all students, male and female, in my experience.
   
10. Reported in Meier, 177.
    
11. On this point, see also Ken Bain and Joanna Norman, "How Can We Best Help and Encourage Students to Learn?," 4.