Helping my students find their voice.

I altered my teaching style a little this semester. In the past, I would go through a series of straight lectures on the topic at hand, with only a few short interruptions to Socratically discuss the more complex parts of the text, and then I would just wait until the end of the lectures on each text to engage in a more free-flowing discussion of the students' reactions to the text we were reading.

This semester, however, I decided to incorporate the free-flowing discussions in every session. Every class I introduce at least one provocative question related to the topic that I get my students to discuss, and allow the discussion to go where it may. The only exception to my discussion-in-every-class rule is when we're running late in our itinerary and have to finish our topic quickly; but even during those times, I give my students a story or an insight which is provocative enough to get them thinking.

I'm not sure if it's a mere coincidence, but it seems that this pedagogical method has been helpful for my students. They recently accomplished their first essay for the semester, and most of the essays reveal that my students have developed a sense of confidence in their own voices, a willingness to go beyond the texts to explain their own thoughts. In comparison, my students in the past semesters were much more timid, much more liable to stick to the text or to what I said in class (sometimes almost verbatim).