Teacher's Guide - Against Lectures

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In the past ten years many philosophy teachers have begun to teach in a different way. Many of us began to experiment with our teaching in order to cope with increasing class sizes. But then we found that the new methods actually worked better. The students learned more and what they learned looked more like philosophy. This book was written to be used in a course which conforms to two central ideas of these new methods. The first is that the way to learn philosophy is to do it yourself, rather than to memorize facts about the conclusions famous philosophers have reached. And the second is that listening to long lectures turns students' minds into a passive, receptive mode in which the critical faculties essential to philosophy are turned off. Let me first explain the problems of teaching philosophy.

Teaching philosophy is hard: In teaching philosophy you are trying to do two things which at first sight seem to be opposites. On the one hand you are encouraging your students to think for themselves, in fact trying to give them confidence to think about things they may have assumed were too hard for them, perhaps for anyone, to think about. And on the other hand you are trying to teach them to be critical, to reject things that don't stand up to analysis. The first of these can sound like "there are no right answers, anything goes." And the second can sound like "this is wrong, that is wrong, look out, everything you are likely to think is wrong."

Teaching with lectures has many dangers. The victims of lectures want to be entertained, but they also want to be given information that they can remember or write down, and which they can reproduce in essays and exams. That's what lectures are for, isn't it? So the lecturer stands up and says "there are no right answers in philosophy; you have to think for yourselves." And the students write down in their notebooks "there are no right answers in philosophy; you have to think for yourselves," and wait for the lecturer to produce some more truths they can absorb and remember.

Small groups are better. In a small group students can learn the techniques of criticism and analysis that are at the heart of philosophy. Learn them by practicing them. And when they do this they can see that the critical spirit is quite consistent with the spirit of intellectual freedom. You can think things through for yourself until you get to conclusions that you are satisfied with, and at the same time accept that someone else might in an equally rigorous way accept very different conclusions. For you can see that some reasons for believing a conclusion are bad ones, but the range of things you can believe for good reasons is enormous. This is something you can only appreciate by experiencing it. And to experience it you have to muck in and get your mind dirty: argue, refute, and be refuted.

The obvious solution might seem to be not to have lectures. But teaching entirely in small groups is very expensive. One compromise solution that is going to be more and more common in higher education is the fragmentable lecture, that is, a lecture which follows a format such as the following. The lecturer introduces a topic for 15 or 20 minutes. Then the students break into small groups of from four to eight, which work through a task for which the lecturer's introduction has prepared them. Then there is a brief discussion involving the whole audience, followed by either another mini-lecture or another task.

Techniques for this kind of teaching have been developed for a number of subjects. The tasks usually consist in setting a problem and asking the groups to come up with the right answer. But in philosophy there are no right answers, at any rate, not in as simple a way as in many other subjects. So there is a problem for anyone wanting to teach philosophy this way, that of setting up manageable tasks which a group of fairly naïve students can perform, and for which there is a definite criterion of success. That is the problem that I think I have begun to crack.

Tasks for small groups: The activities in this book can be used in such fragmentable lectures, and also in smaller classes and discussion groups. The main resources for defining small group tasks in philosophy are arguments, texts, and examples. To perform argument-based tasks the students must first have some concepts of informal logic. They must know about premises, conclusions, validity, and soundness, and must know what is involved in supplying missing premises and counterexamples. That is one reason why in Part I of this book these concepts are introduced, and activities centering on them are used. A text-based task will have one or more short philosophical texts, which the students have to react to or contrast. An example-based task will contain a number of briefly described examples, which the students have to relate to one or more philosophical positions.

Such tasks should satisfy four criteria.
They are self-contained: although the ideas behind the activity will have been discussed earlier in the class or in previous ones, all the material needed to do the task is given in a very short space, usually on one page.

• They are limited: they require that the students tackle a very definite and intellectually contained problem.


• They are objective: there are better and worse solutions to the problem.


• They are suggestive: the search for the solutions will lead to much more interesting and intellectually open-ended questions, but these are not part of the official description of the task.

The second point, the limited nature of the task, may suggest the danger that students will see it as trivial. And the third point, its objectivity, may suggest that it is in fact trivial, since profound philosophical questions don't have uncontroversially right and wrong answers. But when you do an activity like those in Parts I and II of this book with a group of first-year students, you find that it is not very obvious to them what the better answers are. And you will find them giving some really surprising answers. Some of the answers will give opportunities to make basic points which might otherwise seem pedantic. And some will give opportunities for focused mini-discussions between students. (Managing both of these requires skill, but not the same skill as giving a lecture.)

The fact that it can be very unclear to students which responses are live candidates and which are impossible has an important consequence. Students can be very apprehensive about seeming stupid and ridiculous for what they say. So they can be reticent about speaking out, even when they know what they think. One solution to this is to use groups in such a way that individual responses are first aired in the comparative safety of a small group of other students and then exposed to a larger audience. Sometimes one person in a group can speak as their spokesperson, making it clear that it is the group consensus rather than the speaker's opinion that is being stated. In a large enough class you can use a "pyramiding" technique where students first do the activity in pairs or triples and then continue in larger groups of two or three of the pairs or triples, and then continue again in a discussion among the whole class. Some of the activities in the book are meant to allow pyramiding. As the course progresses, students will learn that they can say what they think without being ridiculed. Then it should be much easier to get students to volunteer opinions, to react individually to one another in the hearing of the whole class. And it should then be possible to call by name on individual students whose philosophical temperament you know.

"Incorrect" answers are valuable material. They can reveal that the students are interpreting a philosophical position in a way that you had not anticipated. They can show ambiguities in the exposition of even this book. And they can show that the students have in mind novel and interesting examples. It is always worth finding out why students produce responses that seem to you obviously wrong. But you have to do this without making them feel stupid or publicly exposed.

The teacher's role: Activities need setting up. Before a group can undertake an activity they have to understand the concepts involved in it, and they have to have some sense of the thread of ideas in the course which it is to relate to. You have to spend enough time explaining and situating so that the activity can then work. To do this you have to know your class. You cannot simply present the expositional content of the relevant section of this book as it is; you have to know which aspects will need emphasizing for that particular audience. It helps, especially at the beginning of a course, to have a particular group of students with whom you meet to discuss their attitude to the course; by sensing their preconceptions and their level of sophistication you can pick up valuable information about how to pitch the material for the whole audience.

Each activity in the book has instructions which describe a way in which it can be carried out. But you may often choose to use the material in a different way, to bring out points you want to make, to appeal to interests you know they have, or to fit your own teaching style. Often the procedure implicit in one activity can be used with another. For example, the activity in section 2 of chapter 15 is a fairly hard one. But it uses a procedure of asking students to predict which responses other students would make. If the prediction is wrong then explanations are called for, explanations of the prediction and of the unexpected response. This is a procedure that can be used in a range of other activities. In 15.2 the material that suggests the prediction is found earlier in the activity, but it does not always have to be. The classification of responses to questionnaire sections can be used to set up procedures of this sort: for example, students given an example-based activity can be asked to predict how other students, classified in accordance with a previous questionnaire, will respond to each example.

Whatever procedure you are using, it is mostly a method for getting things going. Very often the class will take over, moving spontaneously into a discussion that is not part of the intended procedure. Welcome this, as long as it is addressing the issues of that stage of the course. The class may be suggesting to you other procedures which work for them.

While groups are working at an activity you will not be addressing them. It is a bad idea to read a newspaper or mark essays during this time, as the class will then think of activity-based teaching as a way of allowing the teacher an easy life. Much better is moving from group to group, spending a few minutes with each, or joining a group for the activity, taking care not to dominate it and choosing different groups on different occasions.

Nearly every section of this book contains material for an activity, though some are primarily exposition sections and some are primarily activity sections. Every exposition section has a closely related activity section, as described in the planning information for each chapter in this instructor's guide. You may find that the material in some sections is too much to use in your class. In that case cut out some of it. Tell the class to do only those parts of the activity that you think they can handle in the time available. The last activity in a section is usually the hard one, so it may be the natural one to cut. But most classes are very mixed in ability, and the book deliberately includes some material for those students who need more challenging. Even if you explicitly avoid this material in your classes the brighter ones will find it. You may know who they are because they've found it.

It is not necessary to use every section for its activity. Some can be used as reading to set up a more traditional lecture or another activity. Some may be best done as activities after students have first thought about them as homework. A group discussion can be shaped around difficulties students found while working alone on a section before the class. Look ahead, use your knowledge of your class, and decide which sections to use for exposition, which for individual pre-class work, and which for group work in class.

Questionnaires: Throughout the book there are sections which are based on questionnaires, in which the students give responses to a number of short questions and then use a scoring system to apply various labels to themselves. These are supposed to expose the students to the issues implicit in the questions and to give them a sense of the meanings of the labels. They should also reveal to students that others have more radically differing philosophical attitudes than they may have imagined.

The classifications that emerge from the questionnaires can be exploited to set up discussions. People with different self-classifications can be expected to differ on related issues emerging in later sections. You should be able to elicit responses from students by saying, for example, "that sounds like a rather conventional response; people who scored themselves as tending more to scientific dogmatism may want to think whether they agree with it."

Some of the labels employed in these classifications may seem pejorative. Students may not like being labeled as dogmatists, for example. There are two responses to this. One is to explain that they are mere labels to sum up a complex intellectual attitude, and to ask the students to find a better description of the attitude that underlies that pattern of responses. Another is to ask them to explain why the label is not a fair description of what they think. This could, for example, be because the selection of questions in the questionnaire is biased. Either way, a discussion is started, and the students are forced to give reasons and to put their attitudes into words.

Keeping things fun: In preparing a class one third of your time should be spent in thinking about the philosophical ideas, and two thirds in thinking about how to present them. For each class think of a few points (two is enough) that you can make really vivid. There are many ways of doing this.

Props can help. I have several times given a class on identity-through-time, which is a fairly sophisticated topic for first-year students, using a large number of balloons. As the students wander into the lecture theater I am blowing up the balloons. The first topic is balloon sculptures. I tape the balloons together into various representational and abstract sculptures and ask their opinions. Balloons pop and it gets slightly chaotic. Then we discuss whether one of the balloon sculptures that emerged at the beginning was the same as any that emerged at the end. The point gets made that a balloon sculpture is not the same as a collection of balloons, as shown by their different identity conditions over just a few minutes. During all this I have been putting balloons aside as they are replaced in a sculpture, so that I can spring the "ship of Theseus" puzzle on them: is a sculpture recreated with all the original balloons a better candidate for being the same sculpture as the sculpture that has undergone frequent changes of its parts? (See chapter 14 section 8.) At the end of the class I ask for comparisons with cars, plants, and persons. I find that the class spontaneously formulates very sophisticated theses about the identity conditions of members of these categories.

They can get tired of you and your voice. A guest lecturer can help. Someone introduced by you who then proceeds to demolish your favorite positions can be a salutary shock to them. A stylized dogmatic presentation of a position by someone who then withdraws, allowing you and the class to pick holes in what was said, provides practice in critical argument. The class can listen to a bland presentation full of apparently harmless opinions with the instructions "find three hard-to-believe claims in what this person will say." Know your class; use your imagination. I find it helps if I don't stand up. If I'm sitting on a chair just as they are, they find it easier to talk back to me

More ideas and materials can be found in many places. There is the journal Teaching Philosophy, and the journals Philosophy Today and the Philosopher's Magazine. Three stimulating books every philosophy teacher should know are:
Martin, Robert M. There are Two Errors in the the Title of this Book.
Rosenberg, Jay. The Practice of Philosophy.
Wilson, Arnold. Demonstrating Philosophy: Novel Ways to Teach Concepts.
There is also the team learning movement, based at the University of Oklahoma. Their point of view is summarized in print in
Michaelsen, Larry, Arletta Bauman Knight, and L. Dee Fink. Team Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups
and on their website (at www.ou.edu/idp/teamlearning).

One last word: the students should expect to enjoy the course and to have their opinions changed by it. So should you.