To highlight a key element of successful teaching, consider this question: When you prepare to teach a class, is your primary focus on the subject, assuming that students will appreciate its details, or is your primary focus on the students, seeking ways to show why the subject should matter to them?
Teachers who concentrate on the subject may find that its presentation leaves the class uninterested and unresponsive. Consequently, those instructors may suppose that their students lack intellectual capacity or scholarly commitment.
A teacher who concentrates on the students seeks to link the subject to their lives. If that connection can be established, the class is likely to become engaged.
Note that focusing on students does not imply neglecting or distorting the subject but only finding ways to relate it to student concerns. After all, not every lecture that is philosophically sound is pedagogically successful. Thus, knowing a subject does not imply knowing how to teach it effectively. The latter skill requires finding ways to stimulate and maintain interest. The difficulty in doing so is a key reason why teaching is hard.
The task is rendered more difficult for beginning teachers who come directly from graduate school, where the emphasis is almost exclusively on mastering details of scholarly subjects. There, concentration on relatively esoteric matters is not only accepted but expected. For example, I devoted a section of my dissertation to assessing Jaakko Hintikka’s reconstruction of the Master Argument for Fatalism offered by Diodoros Cronus, a young contemporary of Aristotle. Yet to spend the time needed to explain such material to an introductory class would be unwise.
Perhaps that possibility appears far-fetched, but I am reminded of the candidate who, at an interview I attended, was asked which readings he would assign to students taking their first course in philosophy. His confident reply: “I would start with Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books.” That impractical proposal suggested a lack of understanding or concern about the capabilities and interests of students.
I myself learned the hard way that the popular subject of free will and determinism should be presented apart from the issue of fatalism. Otherwise, beginning students are likely to be bewildered as they struggle to understand such complex matters as differing interpretations of Aristotle’s doctrine of future contingencies, William of Ockham’s views on God’s omniscience, or Richard Taylor’s controversial proof that widely accepted principles of logic imply that we have no more control over future events than over past ones.
A far more effective approach to the issue of free will is to focus on determinism and responsibility, perhaps using as an example the famous 1924 Leopold and Loeb case in which their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, argued that the boys, due to their upbringing, were not to blame for the murder they committed. The obvious follow-up is to consider whether any of us is ever morally responsible. Most students find that issue pertinent to understanding their own lives and the actions of others; hence, the class is apt to become engaged.
Here is another example I found pedagogically effective. When I taught introductory students Mill’s defense of free thought and discussion in chapter two of On Liberty, I didn’t begin by talking about Mill or his book. Rather, I asked students to suppose that upon entering the building, they saw a table where passersby were being urged to support a petition. I asked them to imagine that they had strolled over to learn more and were invited to sign a letter, addressed to the administration, demanding that an invited speaker with a well-documented record of having expressed racist and sexist views not be allowed to appear. When asked if they would sign, most students were sure they would, and the few holdouts quickly lost confidence in their position as others in the class accused them of insensitivity to the feelings of those who had been victims of injustice.
At that point, I posed the question, “Would John Stuart Mill sign the letter?” Suddenly, the students recognized the significance of Mill’s defense of free expression, and they agreed that Mill would refuse to sign. Then I asked students to explain Mill’s view, and the discussion proceeded apace. This approach did no disservice to the complexities surrounding free speech but made apparent the connection between Mill’s text and the students’ own sphere of experience, thus motivating concern for the topic.
Granted, establishing such a link is easier with some subjects than others, but successful instructors find ways. They ask themselves, “Why should students care about the material I am teaching?” The answer is likely to suggest an effective way to present it.
In sum, you don’t merely teach a subject; rather, you teach a subject to students, and the test of your effectiveness is whether they learn it and view it positively. if they fail to do so, then your knowledge, however profound, has not sufficed for success in the classroom.
Steven M. Cahn
Steven M Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Among the recent books he has authored are Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers, 2019); Navigating Academic Life: How the System Works (Routledge, 2021); Professors as Teachers (Wipf and Stock, 2022), and, most recently, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor, Second Edition (Wipf and Stock, 2024).
