Teaching Tuesday: 2-24-26

Take Your Teaching to the Students

Take Your Teaching to the Students

Travis Joseph Rodgers

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Professor Walt Hunter tells educators to stop meeting students where they are. This tough-sounding approach is bad advice. Students often bring different knowledge and skills to the classroom. So, educators teach Spanish I differently from Spanish III, and Intro to Philosophy differently from a graduate seminar on moral responsibility. But rather than a quick dismissal, Hunter’s suggestions deserve serious scrutiny. It is hard to see how any charitable interpretation departs from what many faculty are doing. To the extent that his advice is a departure, it’s disheartening.

Hunter recommends that educators assign numerous long books that help students form a more complete picture of the authors in question. He also suggests changing how students write, but this goal is an ancillary to give students more time to read. Finally, he touts a characterological change: students will develop better attention spans.

Assigning better readings, better writing assignments, and helping students develop attention spans sound like noble goals. Helping students build broader and deeper understandings of the authors and topics they encounter are also important. But how is any of this a refusal to meet students where they are?

Rather than beginning with what we should assign to our students, let’s begin by thinking about our charge as educators. I see the most direct goals of education as helping to better equip students to gain, store, and demonstrate their knowledge. We can serve these goals by helping students become more eager to learn, better at expressing their knowledge (and limits thereof), and more able to put their knowledge to use in novel situations. These goals rely on students’ curiosity, intellectual clarity (and honesty), and creativity, respectively.

Well-framed advice is easier to understand than slapdash suggestions. When designing a physical fitness program, two key concepts work as limiters: minimum effective (Min) dose and maximal recoverable (Max) volume. There are correlates in educational training. Some tasks are too easy, and some tasks too difficult, for students to learn anything. The educator’s task is to find where to set the needle between these extremes.

Hunter is certainly not recommending giving students assignments that are too easy. But insofar as he’s not, he’s recommending meeting students where they are. To educate effectively, students need materials sufficiently challenging that they can learn from the task. Importantly, a text needn’t be complex to teach most course material. This is especially true in the sorts of courses that are part of the general education program at most colleges. Students in graduate school often read some of the same texts as students in Introduction to Philosophy courses, but the two groups read them at different depths.

Hunter may be recommending giving longer readings rather than short ones. But what is “long” and “short” here? What’s long? 3+ pages, 7+ pages, or perhaps more than 10,000 words?¹ Research can vindicate at least part of Hunter’s advice: reading shorter texts may be inferior at fostering comprehension. Li and Yan (2024) reported that comprehension was better with hard copies, compared to digital, at least when the readings were of medium or greater length (1000-2000 words). Whether there’s a measurable benefit to whole books vs. chapters is a further question, but the data suggests that the Greek adage “mega biblion, mega kakon” (big book, big problem) may be too hasty. Assigning texts longer than 1000 words, even if it’s challenging for students, is not itself a failure to meet students where they are, and it seems pedagogically sound to assign more than snippets.

Not just any long text will do, however, even if it’s seminal in the field, and even if it’s an instructor’s favorite work. There are texts that threaten to exceed the Max at student can reasonably be expected to complete. If we are to educate, then students cannot just run their eyes over the material we assign. They must be able to comprehend the vast majority of the text, at a very high level. Evidence for this claim comes from work on comprehension, especially of non-native languages. Here is a passage from Marcos Benevides’s Extensive Reading: How easy is easy?, presented at 80% comprehensibility to native English speakers:

“Bingle or help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying.” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling.

You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer!

Then you munch that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle.

“...if you get this...” Evie says. “..I can’t vickarn now...the important passit is...” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re her! Crippet...the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!”...”

BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you...

At 80% comprehensibility, that’s not an easy ready. The reader either looks up the words they don’t understand or they skip them. Either way, comprehension doesn’t come quickly. Given time constraints, many students must choose between reading more with lower comprehension rates or less with greater comprehension rates. The less students understand, the lower their performance on assessments on that material. When students do not understand what they are reading, they are more likely to fail to see the point of reading. This fact may partially explain some of the findings of Gorzycki et al.’s “Reading is Important,” but “I Don’t Read.” Notably, students often reported that assigned readings were irrelevant to class and to their success in class.

If “I can help students develop their skills with this text” is the Min, then something like “many students will not engage with this text in a way that helps develop their skills” is the Max. Whether students look up the words or skip them, the instructor can facilitate learning by assigning texts that are more comprehensible to students. Understanding 80% of 1000 words is inferior to understanding 95% of 1200 words, and probably these things can be done in the same amount of time.

Hunter may be arguing that educators should not bother much or at all with that Max. If so, this seems like a mistake. Following this course will simply leave behind students who could relatively easily have been helped. In his defense, Hunter says that students in his class rose to the occasion, suggesting they revealed a higher Max or increased their Max as the semester progressed. If Hunter set the Max whimsically, then there’s some reason to doubt his claim. He offered one anecdote, and I confess I don’t believe it. But no one should accept such claims without more evidence.

More likely, I think, perhaps Hunter unwittingly met students where they were. Perhaps he began with texts in the sweet spot between the Min and Max and then developed to more challenging reads as the semester progressed. This seems to be an effective way of helping students build comprehension and facility for more difficult readings. If a student understands 95% of the words they encounter, then after a week of working on the material, they might reach 96 or 98%. The next reading will use some of the new terminology. In an ethics course, for instance, students who read Jeremy Bentham first will have a much easier time with John Stuart Mill and then John Rawls’s critique of Utilitarianism. So, understanding 95% of those later readings might represent a growth in reading comprehension abilities. My second piece of advice, then, is to help students build up to more complicated readings – but only if the more complicated reasoning doesn’t violate the Min. Perhaps Hunter did this because he’s an experienced teacher and knows what students can handle.

Perhaps Hunter recommends disregarding the lack of resilience some students have. He did note that their short attention spans were an obstacle he worried about. One might wonder whether it’s the job of the educator (at least at the collegiate level) to accommodate students who lack the resilience to stick with assigned readings.

Some psychological research suggests addressing this lack of resilience is not difficult, at least in the abstract. Attribution theories of motivation consider locus (internal vs. external), stability (stable or unstable), and controllability (up to the student or not) of various motivational aspects. If students believe the material itself or the discipline itself is too hard for them (“I’m just not a math/poetry person…”), we should expect students to give up quickly. The material (external) is hard, and their fixed abilities (stable) will not suddenly improve. The only way to improve on that model is for the instructor to change the material, making it easier. Students who see the course this way will think that success is not up to them and will blame instructors who “make” the course hard.

This is where many educators who are discipline experts might feel they have reached their limits. They aren’t coaches or psychologists. That’s fair, but that hardly the end of things. Building resilience can be done by making goal commitment salient, as discussed in “Building Grit” by Tang et al. (2019). Educators can stress how our courses can serve students’ goals. We can teach the students the skills they’ll need to be successful, by their own lights, focusing on in-discipline skills. I think this is what students want when they ask why our courses matter “in the real world.” We can answer these questions honestly. If an educator believes their course really doesn’t matter, that’s an educator who will struggle to meet students where they are – or where they aren’t.

Refusing to meet students where they are seems like a strange line to draw. Exhorting others to do the same is bad advice. The concrete advice Hunter gives is slim, and the proposed benefits are unsubstantiated. It often seems he thinks, like many other educators, that we should meet students where they are, at least in many important ways. I want to urge others to resist Hunter’s advice for a variety of reasons. If we’re doing our epistemic duty, the advice seems on shaky ground. From a pragmatic point of view, if we don’t meet students where they are, we may end up with empty classrooms and without a job. AI programs can fail students for not reading. Human teachers should teach.

1. Doing the Reading: the decline of long long-form reading in higher education (Naomi s. Baron and Anne Mangen), Poetics Today 42:2, June 2021.