Principles to Teach By: Guiding Learning in the Teaching-Intensive Institution

As a lecturer at a regional public university, I often reflect on the difference between teaching and learning. Over a decade of experience has taught me that the act of teaching doesn’t always translate into learning on the part of my students. This has led me to develop strategies to guide my students to learn and not just get by on the test—strategies that also help cope with the large number of students and classes at a teaching-intensive institution. I start each art history course with three guiding questions that we ask about an artwork: Why does it look the way that it does? What does it mean? Why was it made? This paper reflects on how the questions that we ask shape the learning process. Looking at my own practice as a teacher, I present the principles that cut across various courses from introductory Art Appreciation to the art history survey and upper-level courses in contemporary art and criticism, such as how to help students shift from what to why questions. Old-school strategies such as slide quizzes are balanced with new ones that arose out of improvisation and experimentation. We’ll look at how to use small question-driven writing assignments to develop case studies in the survey course, how to break down research projects in upper-level courses, how to reduce test anxiety, how to incentivize good study habits and avoid the study guide, how to keep the “memorization monster” at bay, and how to grade quickly and well.