My older sister teaches writing at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana. She let me sit in on a couple of her classes a few years ago, and she is one of the best teachers at the college level I have ever seen. She sent this comment along in response to a < a href="http://www.danielharper.org/blog/?p=288">previous post:

You’re right about the “old group process techniques.” They’ve become hackneyed, reductive, and unfortunately, often, required. I am all for nurturing the voices of my students, but too often “small group work” or “student centered learning/teaching” means nothing more than busy work or chaotic jabbering. Even my students will say: how can we critique each other’s work in small groups when we don’t yet know how to critique our own? Good question, kids. My teaching combines lectures, guided discussion, mentoring, apprenticeship, and judiciously teaching the students how to teach one another. Maybe the only postmodern thing I do is to teach to different sensibilities, or, I suppose, intelligences. We draw, eat, talk, write, take walks, watch films, talk, write some more, take self-created impromptu field trips, sing, argue, write, write, write. I suppose the fact that I won the big teaching award last summer validates this intuitive approach. Who knows.