Honed Teaching Skills | Takebayashi Tohru, Dean of the Graduate School of Health Management
2019.10.29
There is one class that I remember in particular. It was "Environmental Risk Science," a course I taught for five years to undergraduate students at SFC, starting in the 2007 academic year. I'll skip the long story of how I came to be in charge of it, but when I said I would be teaching a class at SFC, the reaction from those around me can only be described as one of surprise. They said things like, "Don't get mad if students start eating their bento boxes during class." What, they eat bento boxes? And, "If you have them do group work, they'll come up with lively, great ideas." What's group work?
The spring semester of 2007 began with me feeling completely out of my element. Looking back at my lecture files and PowerPoint presentations from that time, I'm filled with nostalgia seeing the traces of how hard I worked to structure the course, inviting opinion leaders in the field as guest speakers and using news articles on the latest topics as teaching materials. However, as you might guess, I couldn't say that I was able to deliver a highly satisfactory class. Despite facing students who I had been told were active participants, I was left with almost no sense that I had managed to connect with them through the class.
This might be beyond the imagination of this column's readers, but in the specialized curriculum of the School of Medicine, the class schedule is a solid block. In other words, the timetable is packed with required courses from the first period on Monday to the fourth period on Friday, and this continues day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. Moreover, the 90-minute lecture periods are a style of cramming in as much knowledge as possible. Having been raised and educated in such an undergraduate environment before becoming a faculty member myself, teaching a class at SFC was like an experience from another dimension. We completely failed to connect.
It was then that I received a hint from the words of a TA and a certain SFC faculty member. In short, I was "over-teaching." As I was mulling over this, thinking, "I know that in my head, but...," they both unexpectedly told me, "If you trust the students and wait, they will speak up!"
Taking that advice to heart, I approached the first class of the 2008 academic year, determined to make a comeback. I completely changed the structure, cutting the number of PowerPoint slides by about half and incorporating in-class work. In the last 20 minutes of that first class, students began raising their hands and speaking up one after another. Before I knew it, the discussion had become so heated that we ran 10 minutes over the class time. It was the first time I had the feeling of a class taking on a life of its own, moving forward beyond my own intentions. It was the moment I truly realized that it is the students who hone a teacher's teaching skills.
A class like this might be commonplace at SFC, but for me, this was my encounter with SFC. That's why it was the greatest reward from the students when one wrote in the course evaluation, "This was the most SFC-like class I've ever taken!"
A long time has passed since I became a university faculty member. In my career as a faculty member, I've enjoyed considerable freedom, thanks to an environment where the old adage about "scholars being put on the shelf" still holds true. Yet, even now, the thing that makes me most nervous is teaching my own classes. The first class, in particular, brings a feeling I never get used to.
It is the students who hone a teacher's teaching skills. I'm sure this has not changed since the days of the Tekijuku. Keeping in mind this lesson that the "owls" of SFC taught me, my days of struggle to continue honing my teaching skills will continue this year as well.