Stop worrying and learn to love worksheets?

To determine if your teaching is effective, you can craft assessments that truly show whether students are learning what you're teaching. You can also ask for instant feedback on the class session, a la the Frederick Mosteller one-minute paper. Or you can take the lazy professor's way out (this is preferred, obviously): you go by your intuitive sense of yourself and your students.

At the end of Monday's session in my MW class, Belief and Unbelief, things didn't feel quite right. As I packed up my multicolored markers and wished the last student to leave a good afternoon, I thought that I had talked too much, too abstractly, and not enough about the really important matters I'd hoped the students would get out of the class session. Even though by my tally, 17 of 24 students spoke up at some point during the class, it just didn't feel like I got enough of them to engage the gears of their minds with the axle of the central concepts I wanted them to master. I regretted distributing a NYT article about the search for "the God gene," which I did in hopes of highlighting the stakes involved in saying that religion is (or isn't) instinctual. That issue seemed a distraction from more important ones, such as making sure they understood what the main text for the day (Hume's Natural History of Religion) was actually saying.


My plan for the subsequent class session had been to get them examining colonialist assumptions in Hume's text, but I think this is a little more than they'll be ready to handle, given how little of the book's central argument we "covered" last time. So instead, they'll do some group work involving, yes, a worksheet. On the worksheet, I'll ask them to list as many characteristics of early humans and their gods as they can find in Hume's text, then winnow those down to the most important characteristics, and finally connect the list of human characteristics with the list of divine characteristics by explaining how humans with such-and-such characteristics would end up inventing gods with these-and-those characteristics to believe in. (Anyone foolish enough to want a copy of the worksheet can email me.) After they're done in the groups, we'll try to come to a whole-class understanding of how Hume connects human nature to early polytheism. If that happens by the end of class time, I'll be happy. And if there's additional time, I can see what I can do to get them thinking about Hume and colonialism.

This exercise makes me wonder, though, first, if I should rely so heavily on intuition in determining if class "went well." Second, I wonder if I might be doing students a disservice by not (a) assuming that they can "get" the main ideas of the reading on their own or (b) giving them higher-order questions to ask of the text, so that class time doesn't just become a substitute for doing the reading. I'm caught between "sink or swim" and "your seat cushion serves as a flotation device." What do you think? Should there be worksheets in college?