A Community Reading Group

Posted: January 8, 2024 by Michael Rifenburg

Michael Rifenburg is Associate Professor of English, co-director of First-Year Composition, and Senior Faculty Fellow for Scholarly Writing at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership.

Teaching is tough! But it gets just a little easier when we gather, share stories, and grow in community. In the Fall semester of 2023, each Monday afternoon, I had the opportunity to gather on Zoom with six other colleagues. With a generous mini-grant from the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CTLL), my colleagues and I purchased copies of James Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. We formed a CTLL Teaching Circle and based our weekly gatherings on specific chapters that we read in advance.

In Small Teaching, Lang offers a variety of adjustments we can all make to our teaching to better foster student success. These are changes that take just a few minutes of time to implement—thus the adjective small. There are two important points to these small teaching adjustments. First, Lang emphasizes that these tips are developed for all classes. They are not just for, say, chemistry or nursing classes, but are designed for in-person, hybrid, and even online classes across disciplines. Second, Lang focuses on tips that are backed by research in cognitive or educational psychology. Using controls and variables and all the elements of a robust scientific study, these teaching tips are empirically proven to support student success!

I don’t want to give away all of Lang’s tips. And as I sit here writing this blog post now, two months after finishing the book, I can only remember a few off the top of my head. (I’m thankful I marked up my copy of the book, so I don’t have to remember all he suggested!)

But what I do remember from these weekly gathering is the community. I remember spending most of our hour together talking about the exigence of Small Teaching: why did Lang write this book? What problem was he trying to solve? I remember sharing Halloween memories when we met the day before Halloween. I remember laughing over each other’s Zoom backgrounds—some colleagues with empty bookshelves behind them and some with overflowing bookshelves. I remember learning much from my colleagues who only teach online, or who teach on a different campus than me and work with different student populations.

Teaching is tough. But teaching can also be lonely. We move between our three or four or five classes each semester with little time for slowing down and connecting. I’m grateful that my six colleagues were up for meeting with me and talking about teaching.

When I emailed them back in early September, I kinda expected my invitation to get lost in the avalanche of emails we receive each day. But they found my email. Matthew Horton, Terry Easton, Kathleen Snow, Patricia Godsave, Chris Barnes, and Marc DiMaggio all responded.

For four weeks, in the middle of another busy semester, we slowed down and talked about everything and nothing.

And, from time to time, we talked about small teaching.