What does it mean to have a good class?

I’m spending a lot of time – too much – staring at a Google document that has a bunch of dates and blank space. 

Whatever I choose to put there is going to be heavily influential in how this semester’s students wind up feeling and thinking about this class.

So obviously I want the class to be good. But what does that mean? Who gets to decide if it’s good? And how do we know they are the best judge of that?

The common approach to whether a course is good is to ask if the students learned anything. And most often, they ask the students in the form of course evaluations. It is now pretty obvious that student evaluations of teaching and courses are meaningless, as they are great measures of student perspective, but not of learning. If anything, a number of these evaluations could be used to support the idea that campuses need intensive, regular, and accessible anti-bias resources for everyone there. 

The modern move is to talk about assessment, which is the idea that good courses are those that create measurable outcomes. These outcomes are in the form of the student being able to do something that they were not able to do before the course. 

I’m simplifying it to be sure. But the assessment that I’ve seen is in the terms that the classroom needs to be this direct, transformative experience on the level of a specialized or a few specialized actions. These actions are thought of as high-level, or elite, or something like that – something that would carry with it the weight of college or university level education. 

Skill-discourse is limited and harmful, particularly in my field of rhetoric. The best example is in the treatment and teaching of fallacies of reasoning, a very important concept if your goal is to teach the reception and production of arguments. Treating fallacy detection and fallacy recognition as a skill communicates that once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. You can see the forms and types, and you are immune. This also happens in a very controlled and distinct environment like a class, or a situation that is class-like, where there is an arbiter of what is “really true” and “real.” Thinking about it like a skill, a thing you learn to do and then repeat the motions, could be a fallacy itself. That is, it might be a fallacy to believe that recognition of the structural form is all one needs in order to prevent fallacies from working. Furthermore, it might be a fallacy of reasoning to assume that understanding leads to immunity.

The other big error in rhetoric pedagogy is the assumption that argumentation is a skill. Based mostly on a bad reading of Stephen Toulmin, instructors encourage students to identify and create warrants – an element of the Toulmin model that is expressly suppressed by arguers and constructed by critics of argument – as the heart of argumentation. As anyone who has read Toulmin knows, the heart of argumentation for him is audience-in-context. The warrant is a way to understand the importance of this, not a validity test of a claim, which is how it is taught. Skill-based pedagogy here confuses an art for a mechanical practice.

I’m believing more and more that a good class is one that never leaves the student. A good class doesn’t teach a skill that can be performed on demand. Instead it haunts the student with the notion that their performances might never be enough. Good classes keep questions alive and kicking, they don’t provide the relief that comes with a professor saying “you’ve got it.” Good classes create fellow travelers who don’t want the journey to end because it is so interesting. Students realize in a good course that the only way forward is to practice the course.

Replacing the term skill and all its derivatives with the term practice would do wonders for learning and teaching. Practice means we do it regularly with an eye toward getting better at it. Practices are a part of our life, they are part of our process of being. They are returned to because you can never get it right, but you can get it better. And if you don’t practice, you are not doing the thing. Practice is the only relationship we can have to something like oratory or argument. Communication is a major practice we are all engaged in all the time. Instead of thinking about it as a set of firm and known skills, why not think about it as a chance to catastrophically fail every time? If we do, we need to practice and make sure we are tracing out all the ways we can get better as well as all the ways we can fail at it. Exploration over result, and result as exigence for the next practice are essential concepts.

A good course is one where the questions, methods, and theories of the course become things the students want to encounter again. They are not happy they are over or gone. Or perhaps they could be happy the course is over, but they continue to think about these things months or years later. Or whenever they are called upon to do the thing, they understand that they must do it  and cannot get it right. They can only get it good. And the determination of good, best, better, and such are only knowable through practice – a regular commitment to thinking through different ways of trying. 

As you can see, I am practicing with articulating this vision. The question that I keep returning to is this: Are you good at arguing if you are not in an argument? A skill-based assessment of an argument class would say of course you are if you can meet the metrics and rubrics. If we take the practice perspective, a successful course would be one where the students reach out after the class is done to continue their conversations, or seek out new resources to read or view or hear, look for places – or create them – where they can continue the encounter with the material with others in the quest to improve, or examine improvement since actually getting better is as difficult to determine as it is to accomplish. 

A commitment to process while engaging with questions might be the most succinct understanding of a good class that I have right now. The questions from this assumption determine what goes into those blank spots on my syllabus. What readings, writings, and presentations will make for prescient encounters that stick with students? What can help them realize that a class – any class – is just the beginning and the ending will not come anytime soon, if ever?