Teaching With Your Mouth Shut by Don Finkle

I should first admit that Teaching With Your Mouth Shut has been sitting on my bookshelf for more than a couple of years—gathering dust and begging to be read. I’ve always found the premise to be enticing, but had never gone beyond the first couple of chapters. Here’s the other full-disclosure comment I need to make before diving in to the book.  Don Finkle taught and wrote about his experiences at Evergreen State College in the state of Washington. Other than being a public institution, Finkle’s experiences at Evergreen State appear to be a world apart from Georgia State, i.e., he is a classics instructor writing at the end of the last millennium in a selective liberal arts college build on cooperative learning groups with an interdisciplinary emphasis and employing narrative statements about students’ work in place of traditional letter grades. Yet, as I read this relatively short book (169 pages, including the appendix), the lessons for any instructor flowed from each page.

The key premise of the book is that Telling is NOT Teaching. Of course, but our practice often belies our conviction.  Finkle bases his assertion on years of teaching in higher education and on research reviews that show interactive forms of instruction ( e.g., discussions) result in higher retention, transfer of knowledge, development of skills, and motivation than do telling/lecturing (see Gardiner, L., 1994).  To emphasize the point, Finkle challenges readers to think about the most significant learning experiences of their lives and surmises that such experiences don’t result from lectures—and quite often teachers were not involved at all.

In the chapters that follow this introduction, Finkle reflects how books, classmates, collaborating and writing promote meaningful learning more effectively than does teacher telling. The principles which guide Finkle’s practice are sound: …students can learn nothing of which they do not feel the real and present advantage in either pleasure or need (p.52, quoting Rousseau) and John Dewey’s guidance to link students’ interest to need. Sometimes (for me) Findle’s  examples of how these principles work fall short. For example,  he assumes that students would have come to class having carefully read the assigned portion of the Illiad (perhaps at Evergreen they do) and that their engagement with the text provides sufficient motivation for them to analyze whether the epic praises or condemns war. One of the most common complaints I hear from GSU faculty is that students do not read what is assigned—even when the material is more relevant and engaging than the Illiad. If we get beyond the specifics of the examples given (nearly all deal with teaching the classics) and consider ways to make course content relevant and meaningful, then the use of texts offer a strategy much more powerful than telling the content to students. The key here is to find a way to make the content of the text meaningful and appealing to students —a puzzle to be solved. 

Four chapters which comprise the heart of the book have a common theme—engage students in the content to develop the skills of the discipline (i.e., critical reading, deep thinking, thoughtful expression). They are reminiscent of John Biggs’ position that learning is not about what the instructor does but about what the instructor gets the students to do. It is emphasizing the skills that is essential—engaging student to make overt responses through reading, discussing the content in order to answer relevant questions, cooperating and collaborating with others, and expressing the conclusions and receiving feedback in writing. Principles of how Finkle accomplishes this are as follow.

• Having unwavering faith that students’ inquiry is superior to teacher’s telling.
• Making the class a safe place to make mistakes and to learn to examine and question external “authority”.
• Students need feedback, but not all student work needs to be graded.
• Guiding inquiry by soliciting questions, highlighting important contributions, providing a good example of inquiry, assisting students to stay focused, and summarizing key points are ways instructors can contribute to student inquiry.
• Writing personal notes to students on how to improve papers, rather than writing comments on their papers.

For me, the chapter on Experiences that Teach: Creating Blueprints for Learning was especially helpful in laying out the structure for promoting student learning.  Finkle outlines the steps for organizing a model course, or conceptual workshop as he describes it, which supports student inquiry.

• The keystone is to present students with an engaging, provocative question to answer.
• Additional questions are presented in a controlled sequence that requires students, working together, to examine various aspects of the problem.
• Plan a beginning, middle and end for the experience which an emphasis on using the skills of the discipline, as well as learning the content. Finkle emphasizes the importance of emotional satisfaction, as well as intellectual closure.
• Conceptual workshops offer the instructor the opportunity to serve as a witness to student learning as well as being a resource. Listening to students typically reveals that their level of understanding is not as far along as the instructor assumed.
• Save the brilliant lecture to be delivered after the conceptual workshop.

Finkle deals with the issue of what happens when an instructor refuses to teaching--what do students do? Is the instructor giving up power or authority and what does it matter?  In his example, the students initially struggle with not being lead by the instructor. After about three weeks of agony, students “launch happily into a discussion when the bell rings, proud of their new found ability to discuss a work of literature in their teacher’s presence without his direct assistance (p. 113). Perhaps at Evergreen. I’m not sure that GSU students would continue to attend the class, let alone come prepared to independently discuss assigned readings. Finkle does warn of the challenges that instructors face if the prevailing classroom culture (especially student expectations)  is that instructors pour content into students’ heads and then students parrot it back. As I read this section, I thought about the feedback we’ve gotten from GSU students about what would help them to learn more. A large number of our students want their instructors to put PowerPoint slide of the course content online (Cliff Notes in the new millennium).  This is the opposite of what Finkle would advise. Even Finkle warns that a single course experience of teaching with ones mouth shut is likely to be met with student resistance.

A concept that Finkle did not address, but which I think fits this approach comes from David Ausubel : “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows”. Getting a sense of students’ prior knowledge and possible misconceptions is inherently available if we tell less and listen more.  Unfortunately, learning about what students’ level of understanding is not something that is in common practice in most classes. We often start with the beginning of the book and attempt to cover the content.

If you would like a copy of Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, we have a couple of copies available in the CII. Just let me know:  hdangel@gsu.edu.