How do we make students “teachable?”

I probably subscribe to way too much stuff, but that’s a matter for another post. 🙂 One of my subscriptions is to The Teaching Professor, a publication for college professors designed to get people to reflect upon their teaching. They have a parallel site called “Faculty Focus” which is free, and does have good material there too worth examining.

The January 23 ^[1]I’m learning that I need to say when I saw certain things, because life is a bit crazy, and there are 6 blog posts at this moment that are in various states of completion, and don’t necessarily … Continue reading post on their paid site definitely got me to thinking. Dr. Stephen Chew, a professor at Sanford University in Alabama, observed about one of his activities:

The purpose of having students go through the activity is to make them teachable, to convince them of the importance of what they are learning and that they do not currently have a sufficient level of mastery of the concepts we will cover.

Dr. Stephen Chew, https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/preparing-to-teach/the-importance-of-making-students-teachable/ (paywalled article)

There are three important ideas worth unpacking in that sentence that we don’t always think about:

1. Are we and our students “teachable” at the point in which we come to a given class?

2. Are we and our students convinced that what we’re learning is important?

3. Are we helping ourselves and our students realize that we don’t have to have all the answers when it comes to the material we’re grappling with?